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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2001 19:40:07 -0700
From: ds2000 <ds2000@mediaone.net>
Reply-To: isml@yahoogroups.com
To: isml <isml@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [isml] Regulate Secret World Of cloning
>From YellowBrix,
http://newsreal.yellowbrix.com/pages/newsreal/Story.nsp?story_id=22959526&ID=newsreal&scategory=Internet&
-
Regulate Secret World Of cloning
Source: Seattle Post - Intelligencer
Publication date: 2001-08-17
Arrival time: 2001-08-18
To spend time listening to Dr. Panayiotis Zavos, who has vowed to
clone a human being by 2003 no matter what, is to be convinced that
Frankenstein not only lives but is now running the lab.
Zavos, who is one of those medical researchers who has become an
international media star in recent weeks, gave state legislators from
all over the country a frightening lecture on molecular biology
earlier this week at a national conference in San Antonio.
Among other things, Zavos dismissed America's fears about where
biological science is taking the human species as "illogical" and said
government bans on cloning won't work because scientists like him are
going to do it anyway.
"If you ban it, this technology will go into clandestine
laboratories," Zavos said, in what sounded like both a threat and a
promise. He and Dr. Severino Antinori of the University of Rome are
working to clone human embryos at a secret location outside the United
States.
The question is: Why?
The answer might not be very logical, but it is messily human.
Scientists such as Zavos are not immune to all the usual temptations
of mortal beings. He wants to be rich. He wants to be famous. And he
wants to be first.
As Zavos told the legislators, "This may be a dirty business, but
someone has to do it."
If this man is the father of cloning - and that in fact is what he and
a handful of others claim to be - then the politicians are hopelessly
outmatched.
Nothing could be more useless than the bill the House of
Representatives passed 265-to-162 to ban all human cloning in the
United States. It's way too late for outright bans.
In fact, the ban that the Reagan administration placed on federal
funding for embryo research in 1981 has had the effect of pushing all
of this research into the private sector, where people like Zavos have
worked in the dark with no oversight or regulation at all.
Now we have a situation where even relatively harmless drugs receive
at least cursory review from the Food and Drug Administration, but
privately funded researchers continue to pursue the idea in their
laboratories that we can - and should - genetically design our own
children.
Like it or not, exceeding the limits of biology is to the 21st century
what pushing the limits of physics was to the 20th century.
The only way to cope with all this is to embrace the positive effects
- using embryos to overcome infertility as well as to coax cures for
Alzheimer's and diabetes - and to criminalize such acts of despotism
as "reproductive cloning," which is growing copies of people.
In other words, rather than thinking in terms of outlawing this
brave-new-world research vs. not outlawing it, we need to acknowledge
that the future we feared is already here, and coping with it is going
to take more bravery than any of us imagined.
The last thing we need is for biomedical researchers such as Zavos to
operate in secret and in other countries, without criteria or
regulations.
Unfortunately, the only way to do that is for the federal government
to fund the research and to fund it at levels substantially higher
than President Bush proposed last week when he proposed that we limit
federally funded research to the 60 stem-cell lines in existence.
The public sector can't afford to let the private sector lead in this
debate. The stakes are too high for all of us.
"I'm not the kind of man who fails," Zavos told legislators.
One of the legislators asked Zavos if he thought that scientists could
clone Thomas Jefferson. Not only Jefferson, answered Zavos, but Adolf
Hitler as well, which is why none of us can allow ourselves to remain
in the dark on this issue.
Whatever happens in the lab needs to happen in the open.
Copyright 2001 King Features Syndicate.
Publication date: 2001-08-17
© 2001, YellowBrix, Inc.
-- Dan S[ISML] Insane Science Mailing List
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:11 MDT