In the ever-evolving field of biomedical research, the future of one crucial area remains in limbo. Two bills in Congress, one by Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and the other by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., may determine the future of therapeutic cloning research.
With biotech corporation Clonaid's announcement that they cloned a human baby in December exploding through the media and an Italian doctor's claim that he impregnated three women with cloned embryos, the cloning debate is anything but a moot topic.
There are two types of cloning: reproductive and research. Some members of the scientific community view the latter with merit, as research cloning potentially holds cures for diseases. Nearly all of the scientific community sees reproductive cloning, the concept of replicating an entire human, unsafe and unethical.
\The driving force behind the Brownback bill has nothing to do with cloning. It's about embryo research,"" said Alta Charo, associate dean of the UW-Madison Law School. ""Brownback had the opportunity to vote against reproductive cloning on any number of occasions, but he refused to do it if he couldn't also ban embryo research.""
The Brownback legislation seeks to prohibit both human reproductive and research cloning and impose severe criminal penalties on scientists and patients who participate in the research.
A competing bill proposed by Feinstein and other leading democrats would prohibit reproductive cloning, but allow research cloning to continue under strict oversight from the Food and Drug Administration and an ethics board.
President Bush announced continued federal funding for stem cell lines whose derivation began by scientists at the time of his speech last year. But under pressure from many cultural conservative organizations and key republican leaders, Bush spoke against both types of cloning, saying that cloning ""would be taking a significant step toward a society in which human beings are grown for spare body parts.""
Research cloning, also known as ""therapeutic cloning,"" might not be that dramatic, at least not yet, according to UW-Madison opthamology Professor, Ronald Kalil.
Kalil said the therapeutic potential of stem cells is enormous, but these programmable cells will have to be tailor-made for a recipient because stem cells, like any other foreign material, cannot evade the body's immune system. He said therapeutic cloning is a way to make this work, however.
The process used in cloning, somatic cell nuclear transfer, involves two types of cells. In this procedure a nucleus from a patient's somatic cell, or non-sex cell, would be injected into an enucleated egg cell in a laboratory dish. The cells would then divide and, given the appropriate conditions, differentiate into specific cell types.
Charo used the example of growing cardiac muscle for a patient that suffers from a heart condition, noting that stem cells are the only way to achieve this type of success because of their ability to perform specialized functions.
The method seems straightforward, but UW-Madison oncology associate Professor, Steven Clark, said more research is needed to find out how useful stem cells will be for medical purposes.
Though stem cells and cloning are tied together, an ethical divide wedges the research down to the small embryo in a laboratory dish that will eventually be destroyed.
But Kalil noted that this embryo, a small cluster of 16-32 cells, is microscopic in size and on its own would not be able to survive or develop.
While Brownback's banning bill is primed for the Republican-controlled Senate, and Feinstein's bill was introduced Jan. 8 in the House, debates only intensify surrounding the issues.
Clark predicted that a full human clone will be produced in a ""couple of months to a couple of years.\
