Woods Hole, Mass. Katha Pollitt is my favorite Nation columnist, but guess what, Katha, you’ve got my objections to cloning embryo stem cells all wrong [“Subject to Debate,” July 23/30].
Maybe now that it’s public knowledge that researchers have been buying women’s eggs so they can make human embryos for research, you may be getting the point. But if not, let me explain. Human eggs don’t grow on trees. They are embedded deep inside women’s bodies; not easy to get at, like sperm. To collect more than one at a time means you first have to give women hormones to shut their ovaries down. You then have to hyperstimulate their ovaries with hormones of another sort so that many more than the customary single monthly follicle and its egg mature. At the right time, you then puncture each follicle and suck out its egg. Sound good for women? Steptoe and Edwards, the scientific “fathers” of Louise Brown, didn’t give her mother hormones because they feared it wasn’t safe. They waited patiently for a follicle to mature and then collected the egg that eventually became Louise. But the fertility industry doesn’t have time for such niceties. Now it’s hormones and mass production.
The concerns Pollitt imputes to me are not what worries me. I worry about what this new “need” for human embryos will do to women. And do you know what? We may never know the answer, because in countries with proper healthcare systems where proper health records are kept, people are not permitted to buy and sell body parts. “The enemy isn’t the research,” Pollitt writes, “it’s capitalism.” Wrong again: The enemy is research under capitalism.
RUTH HUBBARD Valhalla, N.Y.
It’s unfortunate that the usually perceptive Katha Pollitt completely misses the point about human cloning in her column on this subject. Kids produced by in vitro fertilization are one thing: They are made from the standard starting materials–an egg and a sperm. The donor of either may request anonymity, but the resulting infant is guaranteed to be a full-fledged member of the human species, biologically speaking (as well as socially and legally, although these connections are rapidly being eroded in the current environment–see Lori Andrews, The Clone Age, Henry Holt, 1999).
A clone is quite a different animal, however. It is constructed of parts of cells (an egg missing its nucleus; the nucleus of an adult cell) that never meet in the course of reproduction. Evolution has never had to deal with, and arrive at correctives for, the errors introduced into the developmental process resulting from this atypical combination of cell parts. No wonder virtually all attempts at animal cloning have led to fetal deaths, multiple birth defects or severe health problems later in the lives of even the most sound-looking clones. This is not a set of problems that can be worked out in mice before confidently being attempted in humans; it is probably too complex to be fully controlled, and in any case, each species presents unique complications.
A Massachusetts company, Advanced Cell Technologies, has announced that it is now producing clonal human embryos as a first step in producing donor-matched therapeutic stem cells. And now biotechnology industry representatives have begun to make common cause with some of their anti-choice beneficiaries in Congress in trying to define such embryos as “not true human embryos” in order to thwart laws against their production and manipulation. Indeed, if Pollitt’s blasé attitude toward the production of full-term human clones becomes prevalent, we can look forward to the day when the not-quite-natural, not-quite-artificial products of human cloning experiments (disconnected, as they would be, from any social network other than that defined by ownership rights) are also redefined as “not true humans.” This would open the way to their finding use as sources of transplantable organs,experimental laboratory models or perhaps, for the most presentable examples, wounded hero status in the march of reproductive technology. Would Pollitt flip off concerns about “threats to ‘human individuality and dignity'” in this not very distant brave new world?
STUART A. NEWMAN San Francisco
On the question of human cloning, Katha Pollitt’s usually reliable political insight has failed her. She dismisses the pro-choice statement calling for bans on human cloning–signed to date by more than a hundred women’s health and reproductive rights leaders–on the grounds that the pending Congressional bills to prohibit cloning are the “brainchildren of anti-choice Republican yahoos.”
But that’s precisely the point: Human cloning and genetic manipulation are feminist-liberal-progressive-radical issues. We leave them to the anti-choice crowd at our considerable peril.
The recent deluge of news about stem cells has generated a great deal of confusion about cloning. Two clarifications are key: First, opposition to cloning can and does co-exist with support for research on embryonic stem cells, using embryos from in vitro fertilization procedures. Stem cell research and embryo cloning intersect, but they are technically distinguishable–and vastly different politically.
Second, looking at human cloning through the lens of abortion politics blurs and distorts its meaning. The prospect of cloned or genetically “enhanced” children is ominous because it could so easily trigger an unprecedented kind of eugenics, one implemented not by state coercion but by upscale marketing campaigns for designer babies.
Pollitt thinks this scenario unlikely. I invite her to reconsider. The marginal figures she mentions–the Raelians and the cowboy fertility doctor Panos Zavos–are not the only champions of human cloning, and they are far from the most dangerous.
Already biotech companies are jockeying for patents on procedures to clone and manipulate human embryos. And for several years now, a disturbing number of influential scientists, biotech entrepreneurs, bioethicists and others have been actively promoting human cloning and genetic redesign. Some are open about their ambition to set humanity on a eugenic path and to “seize control of human evolution.”
One example among many is Princeton University molecular biologist Lee Silver. In multiple appearances on national television and in the newsweeklies, Silver has plugged the “inevitable” emergence of a genetic caste system in which the “GenRich” rule and the “Naturals” work as “low-paid service providers.” Like others of his persuasion, he seems quite ready to abandon any pretense of commitment to equality–or even to a common humanity.
Pollitt is right to caution against accepting wildly overblown claims about the power of genes to determine everything from sexual orientation to homelessness. But it would be foolish to overlook the rapidly expanding powers of genetic manipulation, or to dismiss the possibility that the advocates of a “posthuman” future will achieve enough mastery over the human genome to wreak enormous damage–biologically, culturally and politically.
Free-market eugenics is not science fiction or far off. It is an active political agenda that must be urgently opposed.
MARCY DARNOVSKY New York City
“It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s…Superclone?”–my column on cloning–was probably the most unpopular “Subject to Debate” ever. Clearly this is a vexed subject, with many aspects, some of which are noted in the letters above.
The hormone-stimulated ripening and extraction of eggs, which Ruth Hubbard vividly describes, are, as she notes, the basis of much assisted reproduction, including now-routine procedures like in vitro fertilization with one’s own eggs. Indeed, many college newspapers advertise for egg donors, and many students are willing to go through the extraction process and to take on its risks in return for substantial fees. Cloning would expand this market–how much, we don’t know–but the market already flourishes.
While I, too, am troubled by so many women undergoing procedures whose long-term safety is still unknown–I mentioned this in my column as a fair objection to cloning–the fact is that every day all sorts of people take risks for money, or knowledge, or pleasure, or survival. What makes eggs so sacred? And would Hubbard approve of cloning embryos if the eggs were obtained in the “patient,” old-fashioned way?
Stuart Newman and Marcy Darnovsky raise “brave new world” scenarios that to me do indeed sound farfetched and wild, and not even all bad–why would it be bad to “design” healthy babies, cloned or not? In any case, cloning seems like an odd place to begin worrying about a society divided into classes destined from birth for different levels of health, wealth and personal development: We live in that society now!
KATHA POLLITT
Professor emeritus of biology Harvard University
Board member, Council for Responsible Genetics (www.gene-watch.org)
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Professor of cell biology, New York Medical College
Board member, Council for Responsible Genetics (www.gene-watch.org)
Exploratory Initiative on the New Human Genetic Technologies
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