President Clinton announced that he would send Congress a bill that would ban the cloning of human beings. Clinton made the announcement immediately after receiving a report of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) requesting that "the federal legislation must be enacted to prohibit any person to attempt, either in research or clinical, to create a child by means of somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning. "While such a ban would cover both public and private laboratories, it does not limit biomedical research in progress.
the 18-member NBAC began to study the ethical issues surrounding human cloning in March, shortly after Ian Wilmut of Edinburgh Joslin Institute in Scotland announced it had cloned the DNA of an adult sheep to create the now famous lamb "Dolly". This triggered an explosion of concern about human cloning. Congress started talking about new laws, and Clinton ordered a moratorium on the use of federal funds for human cloning and NBAC asked to report within 0 days with recommendations.
NBAC has not based its recommendations on any particular religious or moral view of cloning, because no set of values is universally accepted. Instead, it focuses on safety. Noting that it took Wilmut 277 attempts to clone a single lamb in good health, the report concludes that an attempt to clone a child would be "premature experience" with "unacceptable risk." For example, it might hurt psychological infertile couples who try the technique. that alone, the report says, justifies a ban on the cloning of human beings at present.
Clinton agreed, saying that human cloning "has the potential to threaten the sacred family bonds at the heart of our ideals and our society. "in an apparent afterthought, he noted that" there is nothing inherently immoral or wrong with these new techniques "if they are not not used to clone humans because they "hold the promise of revolutionary new medical treatments and lifesaving cures."
These messages both reassured and worried about biomedical research. Roger Pedersen, a developmental biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, was relieved that NBAC was not seeking "legal control" over all cloning experiments. But he laments what he sees as an "unprecedented proposal to criminalize a field of research." He fears that once the precedent prohibiting research has been defined, it could lead the legislature to restrict other prey research the controversy.
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