Open Letter to Sen. Kennedy and Kerry Urging Them to Ban All Human Cloning

Would Benefit Only the Rich

March 8, 2002

Dear Senators Kennedy and Kerry:

As the date approaches for you to vote on human cloning for so-called "therapeutic" purposes, I hope you will consider the issue from a new angle.

Do you realize you've been lied to by companies such as Advanced Cell Technology on the simple practicality of "therapeutic" cloning? There are simply not enough eggs for their plan to succeed. There is no way most needy patients' clones can be produced, given the need for human eggs to grow them in.

Only the richest elite could benefit from such medical technology. Even if the scientists are able to encourage the clone embryo to grow large enough to extract stem cells and even if the stem cells do what they're expected to do once injected into the patient and even if there are no tissue rejection problems (the excuse for this specific research), this will benefit only the rich.

Dear Senators, as advocates of accessible health care, imagine a scenario where desperately poor women will yield their eggs to rich patients, given the dangers involved in egg extraction. Is this what you intend to encourage: the wealthiest prolonging their lives at the expense of the poor? Further, the biotech industry is clearly exploiting the pain and suffering of millions of sick Americans, lobbying for research which can never yield relief for the great majority of these patients.

Your Democrat colleague, Senator Mary Landrieu, opposes human cloning experiments out of fear it would lead to "potential exploitation of women" egg donors. Harvard professor emerita Ruth Hubbard told a Mass. State House hearing last December that the motive of the cloning researchers "is not to relieve suffering but to make money. It's simply to stake out a claim."

In a recent article in The Weekly Standard, Wesley J. Smith has written of this "false promise of 'therapeutic' cloning":

"There is increasing evidence that therapies based on cloned embryo cells would be so difficult and expensive to develop and so utterly impractical to bring to the bedside, that the pie-in-the-sky promises which fuel the pro-cloning side of the debate are unlikely to materialize. Not only is human cloning immoral but it may have negative utility -- in other words, attempting to develop human cloning technologies for therapeutic use may drain resources and personnel from more useful and practical therapies" (such as stem cells from adults instead of from cloned babies).

Smith explains that "the 'egg dearth' is a mathematical certainty." He cites a study by stem cell researcher, David Prentice of Indiana State University, who did the math for just one patient group, diabetics. You must therefore multiply these amazing results many times over to cover all those groups who have been promised cures: sufferers of Parkinson's, stroke, cancer, spinal cord injuries, heart disease, multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease, etc.

Prentice's estimates for helping the 16 million diabetics in the U.S. run as follows: Given a 20% success rate in cloning patients' cells to the blastocyst stage (needed for stem cell development), and assuming that stem cells would be successfully extracted from only 10% of these blastocysts, 800 million eggs would be needed to produce therapeutic stem cells for the 16 million diabetics! If 10 eggs were harvested from each donor, 80 million women of childbearing age would have to agree to go through the dangerous hyper-ovulation/egg extraction procedure. And this would be to help only the diabetics in the U.S., not any of the other sufferers promised cures.

Wesley quotes Peter Aldhous, Nature magazine's chief news and features editor, who wrote last December, "The idea of 'therapeutic cloning' seems to be on the wane. By creating cloned human blastocysts, some experts have argued that it should be possible to derive [stem] cells perfectly matched to individual patients. But most now believe this will be too expensive and cumbersome for regular clinical use."

If Advanced Cell Technology is smart enough to clone humans, they are certainly smart enough to do the "egg-scarcity" math. Their motives for cloning are thus thrown into question. Have their critics been right all along in saying that the distinction between "therapeutic" and "reproductive" cloning is phony? It does appear that Advanced Cell, and other researchers of their ilk, just want to clone, period.

It is now clear, Senators, that your planned vote to allow this phony "therapeutic" cloning will surely put us on the slippery slope to reproductive cloning, without resulting in any cures for those not sharing in the wealth of a Christopher Reeve. So why, Senators, do you persist in supporting "therapeutic" cloning? Is the biotech lobby that powerful?

Senators, I urge you to reconsider your support for this unnecessary and dangerous research direction. Senator Kennedy, please withdraw your sponsorship of S.1758. I ask you both to support the Brownback-Landrieu bill, which would ban all human cloning, S.1899.

Sincerely,
Amy Contrada, Acton