The Battle of the Ban...Continued from page 2

Weldon told Citizen in an interview before the hearing that such reasoning is illogical. What makes an embryo distinctly human, he said, is not its location or method of production but its genetic profile.

Brownback, speaking at the subcommittee hearing, described the distinction between therapeutic and reproductive cloning as "misleading."

"However one would like to describe the process of destructive cloning, it is certainly not therapeutic for the clone who's been created and then disemboweled," he said.

Brownback later introduced another ally as a committee witness ― Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, which last July called for a four-year moratorium on human cloning.

"I offer four objections to human cloning to produce children," Kass testified. "One, it involves unethical experimentation on the unborn. Two, it threatens identity and individuality. Three, it turns procreation into manufacture. And four, it means despotism over children * giving one generation unprecedented control over the next and marking a major step toward a eugenic world in which children become objects of manipulation and products of will."

The subcommittee's ranking Democrat, Ron Wyden of Oregon, challenged Kass' caution, insisting that "suffering Americans" cannot afford to wait for Congress to sort out its moral and ethical concerns.

"All of those with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and these dread diseases, they want to see the federal government get behind them," Wyden said. "They want to see the federal government go out and push as hard as it possibly can to find these cures."

Kass leaned forward, his voice quickening:

"Look, I don't think I take second place in the concern for the needs of suffering humanity. * One runs a terrible risk of cruelly exploiting the needs and wishes of patients with the promise that the cures are just around the corner. We don't know." Earlier, Kass was even more emphatic, describing the idea of embryonic stem-cell therapy as a "pipe dream."

There are limits to what a civilized society can do to help its citizens, Kass added.

"We do not allow the buying and selling of organs for transplantation even though lives might be saved," he said.

In a New York Times column published Jan. 24, Kass listed nations that seem to understand the moral perils involved in cloning.

"Germany, Italy, France, Norway, Australia and other democracies, many of which support embryo research, have said no to [cloning]," Kass wrote. "The European Parliament, hardly an arm of the religious right, has also called for the prohibition of all human cloning."

Biotech Hazards The question facing a closely divided Senate is, which voices will fence-sitting, finger-in-the-wind senators heed?

In Washington, D.C., money talks, and the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) speaks with a loud voice. Representing more than 1,000 companies, the BIO employs 70 people and operates on a $30 million budget in offices just a few blocks from the White House.

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