Reproductive Cloning Reconsidered

News

The first successful cloning of primates makes the headlines in the scientific press today.
(See also yesterday’s contribution by Dominic Wilkinson to this blog.)
The researchers were successful in cloning a primate embryo by inserting a skin cell of a grown-up rhesus macaque into an egg of the same species which had the DNA removed. The same basic procedure gave birth to Dolly the sheep in 1997. The cloned rhesus macaque embryos are then used to make embryonic stem-cell lines.

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/071114/full/news.2007.245.html

 

General Ethical Concerns

As is the case in most research which can be classified as `basic’, cloning might yield benefits we would not wish to jeopardise. The rhesus macaque clones lead to heated speculations about the potential of somatic cell nuclear transfer in the curing or alleviating of degenerative diseases.  But such basic research most often also threatens us with hazards, related to, for example, the (hard-to-control) misuses and unwanted and unavoidable side effects of its technological implementation.

In both advertising its benefits as well as worrying about its hazards, the so-called `therapeutic (or embryo) cloning’ like the one reported yesterday has to be distinguished from `reproductive cloning’ on the one hand and from `DNA cloning’ (or `recombinant DNA technology’) on the other hand. The latter is less controversial and in use since the 1970s. All three types of cloning raise different ethical questions, but also are distinct empirically - though, of course, progress in one field, might also advance the other. This might be the case for the recent breakthrough in the cloning of primate embryos: For example the reported progress made recently with primate embryos might yield a break through in reproductive cloning. Presently these are just dreams of the future, even for the reproductive cloning of monkeys, as S.M. Mitlipov points out, who was the leader of the recent research on rhesus macaque.

 

Reproductive Cloning

Nonetheless, the discussions on cloning are often blurred. News like the above raises in some the hope, and in some the fear of reproductive cloning of humans. These hopes and fears, though they might be experientially unjustified at present, do influence our attitudes towards cloning as a whole. They thus in turn influence the research funding from public sources.

That is why it is important to raise at this early stage the question if and why a state in which reproductive cloning is allowed is really the bugaboo it is commonly taken as. Thereby we focus on an ideal-type of cloning in which the clones do not show deficiencies in comparison to natural offspring, for example in terms of life expectancy.

The raised question then takes us to the central question of the function and purpose of a state. This is not the place to discuss this question in depth. Just to note that it is not the cone-end of modern, liberal or even very liberal thinking that choosing ones offspring is seen as a very private affair, with which the state has to infer as little as possible. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, but these must be well grounded. The primary function of the state is to serve for the people who live in it. It is not up to the people to provide the state with a certain kind of order (unless it is in their interest) and the even lesser it is up to the people to secure that the state can survive in its status-quo by providing the right type of citizens. Whenever individuals, groups of individuals, nations etc, subrogate some of their rights to the corresponding higher institution, it is up to the higher level to vindicate this step.

In political theory this principle is sometimes referred to as subsidiarity when it comes to the subrogation of rights from one (local) institution to another (usually national, super-national one). However the roots of this principle are much older and can be traced back to what Aristotle characterized as `justitia commutativa’ (in English roughly: exchange of justice).

That is to say: When the state wants to forbid some kind of offspring, as this is what clones might represent, it must provide us with good reasons why it interferes in such genuine private decisions. And even if we do not want to count a clone as an offspring, some people might just believe that cloning is the ultimate way for them, and possibly for others, to achieve happiness. They might be utterly wrong about that. But in modern heterogeneous societies, the state as a national or super-national institution does not seem to be the right place to address what happiness means for the individual.

 We can imagine scenarios where the above argument breaks down. For example, the currently known animal clones live significantly shorter than natural offspring. Hence the principle not to deliberately harm humans (or animals) forbids in this case the cloning. The above argument also breaks down for a society which becomes highly unstable as the genetic human pool is drastically reduced due to excessive cloning. This might yield similar threats to the future existence of mankind as the green revolution, which by reducing the gene pool for many seeds makes them vulnerable to rare and harmful events. However the latter is a scenario which, firstly, seems very unlikely. Although some people might find or think to find their ultimate happiness in cloning themselves or in cloning of dying loved ones – a child killed in accident, to give a dramatic example - this will not be the majority. Many people are clearly aware of the fact that the personality of their dying child is more than the sum of its genes and so neither witchcraft nor wizardry and not even molecular biology can compensate them for their loss. Secondly, people have offspring for the sake of having children and all that which goes with it, and quite often of the wish to have children involves having them together with a partner. The availability of reproductive cloning devices will not alter these wishes. The slope we enter with a society which leaves the decision to make or make not use reproductive cloning facilities is not necessarily slippery: Suitable institutions can prevent the slope from becoming slippery. For example, the misuse of cloning, just as the misuse of other technologies, has to be regulated.

 The dangers of a society which ignores the rights of the individual in such a personal matter outweigh the harm of a liberal attitude towards reproductive cloning. The latter harm includes the hurt moral feelings of people opposed to cloning as well as the injustice which might arise due to the fact that cloning is most likely only available for some social groups. This selectivity, though very serious, is not specific to cloning. The same holds for the dangers which go along with the abuse of cloning facilities. However these provide no arguments against a liberal attitude to reproductive cloning per se.

The fact that the embryo cloning which was reported in Nature yesterday might yield to reproductive cloning even of humans in some however distant future is one reason for the wide resonance this research gets outside the scientific community. However, this possible future side-strain of the research does not give arguments pro or against the current research on embryo or therapeutic cloning.

 
References

Original publication

 

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/nature06357.pdf

 

Reactions in the public press

http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3152325.ece

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7094215.stm#graphic

 

http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3155079.ece

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2870675.ece

 

Useful background information on the Web (with further links)

 
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/cloning.shtml

 

http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/landing.asp?id=1202