Harvard Fights Cloning Ban

As a Senate vote to ban human cloning nears, University officials are stepping up efforts to defeat the bill.

While officials said they support a ban on cloning for reproductive purposes, they said the bill, sponsored by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), goes too far in criminalizing a technique essential to potentially life-saving research.

“Everyone recognizes the danger, both for the potential clones and for the mothers, posed by reproductive cloning,” said Associate Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs Jane H. Corlette.

But by banning somatic cell nuclear transfer, one step in the process to clone a human, the bill will also prohibit scientists from developing stem cells that won’t be rejected by a patient’s body, Corlette said.

University President Lawrence H. Summers wrote a letter late this winter urging Harvard alumni senators to vote against the Brownback bill which would impose prison sentences and huge fines for scientists who use cloning techniques central to stem cell research.

In his letter, Summers wrote that the Brownback bill would prevent research into new therapies for diseases ranging from diabetes to alzheimers.

He encouraged senators to support two alternatives bills—one sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinsten (D-Ca.) the other by Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Arlen Specter (R-Penn.)—that would ban reproductive cloning but allow somatic transfer techniques to be used for “therapeutic cloning.”

Now, with a vote on the Brownback legislation likely before Memorial Day, Harvard and a group of 68 other organizations—known as the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research (CAMR)—are redoubling efforts to defeat the bill. CAMR is made up of academic institutions, patient advocacy groups, medical societies and biomedical industry groups.

According to Tony Mazzaschi, associate vice president of the Association of American Medical Colleges and a member of CAMR’s board of directors, the coalition is running print and radio advertisements to raise the public’s awareness of the benefits offered by therapeutic cloning techniques.

This is not the first attempt by Congress to ban human cloning, nor is it the first time the University has vocally opposed the legislation. Harvard, along with a smaller coalition, opposed a similar bill that was ultimately defeated in the Senate in 1998.

But when the House of Representatives passed its version of the Brownback bill last year, the fight took on greater urgency, Corlette said.

In 1998 when Bill Clinton was president, Harvard’s worry was that opponents of cloning would gain enough votes to override a promised presidential veto, Corlette said.

Now, President Bush has indicated his support of the bill, and Corlette said that as of now estimates were that there were more Senators either planning to or leaning to vote ‘yes.’

Still, Corlette said that CAMR was hopeful that given the large number of undecided senators the bill could still be defeated.

Ultimately, both Mazzaschi and Corlette said that the coalition’s success will hinge on whether patient advocacy groups can make the case for the new therapies.

Corlette said that she wasn’t aware of any Harvard researchers currently running afoul of the proposed law. However, stem cell research by Harvard scientists like Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences Douglas A. Melton will ultimately require somatic cell transfer techniques to be put to therapeutic use.

Corlette said that the threat of “unprecedented” jail sentences and penalties of up to $1 million would stifle even scientific research now deemed legal.

“A scientist would think twice about entering any field that you could be thrown in jail for doing something you think is good, or a field where what’s legal could change from administration to administration,” Corlette said.

—Staff writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.