Will they throw the bath water out with the baby? The US Congress is still debating whether to outlaw cloning humans.

Abstract

There appears to be no historical precedent for what a committee of the illustrious US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) did in January: it called for outlawing a certain kind of scientific endeavour. The reaction of US scientists to the promulgation of a ban was equally unprecedented: they went along with it—meekly. The NAS committee recommended that cloning human embryos for procreation purposes should be prohibited by law and that violations should be punished severely. In reality, this was a last‐ditch attempt to salvage another kind of human cloning: embryo creation via somatic cell nuclear transfer with the aim of generating stem cells for disease research and, ultimately, therapy. The report drew an emphatic distinction between two forms of cloning that are all too often lumped together: reproductive and therapeutic. Reproductive human cloning, it said, should not now be practised because animal research shows that it is dangerous to the potential mother and baby—and likely to fail. But these strictures, it argued, did not apply to nuclear transfer for the production of stem cells, which should be allowed to proceed with no restrictions. Science lobbyists such as the gigantic Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, representing 21 research organisations with 60 000 members, immediately endorsed the report and its call for a legal ban on reproductive cloning. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), a heavyweight research lobbying consortium, followed suit, although in the past it had urged a different approach, a voluntary moratorium on reproductive cloning. Tony Mazzachi, an AAMC official, called the report ‘A very thoughtful, nuanced discussion and recommendations—and it parallels almost exactly AAMC's position.’ ![][1] The NAS recommendations may be somewhat more palatable to researchers because they called for what is known in the USA as a sunset provision: the report asked that any ban be … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif