The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, and The Los Angeles Times report President Bush's fervent plea yesterday for the U.S. Senate to vote in favor of criminalizing research aimed at producing perfect medical transplants. Specifically, Bush asked that the Senate support legislation introduced by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) that would outlaw medical research on microscopic embryos. Such embryos, created by using a patient's own cells to produce stem cells, might one day produce tissues and organs that perfectly match his or her immune system. Therapies based on stem cells and therapeutic cloning could one day benefit as many 100 million Americans, according to a report issued by the National Academy of Sciences last September.
If politics routinely gives rise to strange bedfellows, the cloning debate has created an orgy scene straight out of Fellini's Satyricon. In the name of "fusion biopolitics," elements of the far left have teamed up with the neoconservative and religious right to oppose cloning.
On the up side, 40 Nobel laureates have just released a letter warning that a ban on cloning "would have a chilling effect on all scientific research in the United States." The prospect of such a ban has already prompted at least one American researcher to decamp to Britain, which has recently approved such research. In addition, the Franklin Society, a new pro-technology advocacy group, is circulating a petition in favor of therapeutic cloning research.
In his speech President Bush declared, "Our children are gifts to be loved and protected, not products to be designed and manufactured." He's right. Children should be protected from diseases, disabilities, and early death.
And biomedical advances such as therapeutic cloning will make it that easier to achieve exactly that goal.
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