Some 87 percent of Americans say the cloning of humans should be banned, according to a new poll released by ABC News Nightline program.

Eighty-two percent said cloning human beings would be morally wrong, and 93 percent said they personally would not choose to be cloned.

But six percent of the 519 adults polled on Feb. 24 said they would like to be cloned.

Americans are split on the scientific breakthrough, the pollsters said, noting that 50 percent disapproved of the research, but 53 percent said cloning animals should be allowed in the name of medical research.

If such research could lead to lifesaving drugs or medical techniques, a higher number of 71 percent said it should be allowed, ABC said.

The poll, which was released late Tuesday, had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

Ethicists have been asking 'what if' for years. But the scientists always said, 'Don't worry about it,' Dianne Barthels, associate director of the University of Minnesota Center for Biomedical Ethics, said Monday.

We thought this wasn't possible and that we didn't have to worry about it for a while, she said. Then it happened.

President Clinton Monday called on his national bioethics advisory panel to review the legal and ethical implications and report back in 90 days.

In the United States it is illegal to use federal research money for most human embryo research, but there are scant restrictions on privately-funded science. The biotechnology industry has called for a clear legal ban on human cloning.

This past weekend, Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh reported that he had used the cell of an adult sheep to create a baby clone.

The technology is still clumsy and too imperfect for widespread use, and Wilmut has stressed he intends it to be used on animals, not people.

The possibilities are vast, ranging from saving endangered species, to cloning cows that can yield huge amounts of milk, to developing a crop of identical mice that can speed up the search for cancer treatments.

Notice that these things all involve animals -- and they involve recognized social goods, said Glenn McGee, an ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of a new book called Perfect Baby.

McGee said it is too soon to know if the sheep technique could actually produce human babies. But for the sake of argument, if you could do this with people, we shouldn't, he said.

I think, frankly, we need a national commission on genetics and the family, which will study the whole range of these new opportunities parents have to engineer their children. We're in the process of moving from an era of parents having babies to an era where they make babies, he said.

Some scientists believe the technique could work on humans -- and that it is just a matter of time before someone tries it, whether in an attempt to recreate a dead loved one, or in an act of ego and hubris to reproduce or perpetuate themselves.

But even in that case, someone who may be physically identical to another person would still be born in a different time, and face different environmental, cultural and historical experiences.

To people who have been following this field, the sheep cloning was not a total surprise, said Ed Berger, a biologist and ethicist at Dartmouth College. Scientifically, technologically, we sort of knew it was going to happen eventually.

The scientific roots go back to experiments with frogs and toads in the 1970s, but the accompanying moral and ethical questions got postponed partly, in Berger's view, because they were just too hard and too scary.

They never took place, we never said, what are the serious ethical arguments against it. And we have to have that debate now, he said.

If it's unnatural, weird and maybe offensive to do this with sheep, it's orders of magnitude weirder to do it with humans, Berger said. Nevertheless, he expects it to happen.

You'd have to be a fool not to be astonished by this, you are filled with awe of the achievement of these scientists, said Eric Parens, at the prestigious Hastings Center on medical ethics.

But we do need to learn to step back. One ought to start worrying about what it is that we value about each other. It seems to me that we make a mistake if what we value most are the sorts of traits that are encoded in our genome. This way of thinking contributes to misconceptions about what it means to be a human being, he said.

Feb-97
Source: Newswire