WASHINGTON, Nov 26: Religious and political leaders worldwide, from President George W. Bush to the Vatican, condemned on Monday news that a US company had cloned a human embryo for the first time.
The announcement by Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) of Worcester, Mass. on Sunday, raised a multitude of questions over cloning, with Bush calling it “morally wrong” and others saying the company had crossed a moral and ethical line.
“The use of embryos to clone is wrong,” Bush said. “We should not as a society grow life to destroy it. And that’s exactly what’s taking place. And I have made that position very clear,” he told reporters.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer urged the US Congress to ban human cloning, saying the president viewed this as a wise action to take. The House of Representatives has already passed legislation banning the kind of procedure used by ACT but the Senate has not yet acted on the law.
“The president hopes that as a result of this first crossing of the line and this first step into the morally consequential realm of creating a life to take a life in the name of science, that the Senate will act on the House legislation so that this procedure can be banned,” he said.
Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, is set to introduce a bill calling for a six-month moratorium on cloning and then a vote on a total ban, said his spokesman Erik Hotmire.
Opposition abroad to human embryo cloning was equally as blunt as the senator’s, with the Vatican charging that the American company had tampered with human life.
“Notwithstanding the humanistic intents ... this calls for a calm but resolute appraisal which shows the moral gravity of this project and calls for unequivocal condemnation,” the Vatican said in a statement from Rome.
But ACT chief executive officer Michael West strongly defended his company’s research and said their work was aimed not at creating a human being but at mining the embryo for stem cells to treat diseases from Parkinson’s to juvenile diabetes.
“We can do so much more good than bad and we ought to be concerned about over-reacting in our fears about a brave new world,” he said in an interview with NBC’s “Today” show.
West compared the opposition to cloning as the whirlwind created years ago by those opposed to in-vitro fertilization which he said was now seen as a wonderful thing.
BROAD CRITICISM: But as the company defended itself, more and more countries said they were against the kind of research conducted by West and his colleagues, including the European Commission which said it would not finance any similar projects.
“Not everything scientifically possible and technologically feasible is necessarily desirable or admissible,” European Research Commissioner Philippe Busquin said in a statement.
In Germany, the president of the Association of German Doctors, Joerg-Dietrich Hoppe, said the new cloning experiments were “unethical and testify to a horrifyingly low estimation of human life.”
“It has also become clear from the events in the United States how important international agreements which prohibit the cloning of human embryos are,” he said.—Reuters
