Biotech companies ask voters to guarantee cloning rights

Biotech companies ask voters to guarantee cloning rights
Ballot box decision could launch plan for embryo creation, destruction

The biotech industry is awaiting word on election day – Nov. 7 – whether voters in Missouri will allow them to move forward with a "cloning ban," which despite its name would guarantee unlimited permission for the companies to dip into tax coffers to create and destroy embryos during "research."

Pro-life organizations are aghast over what they call the deceptive information being utilized in the effort to convince voters to approve the state's Amendment 2, which would lock into the state constitution the industry's right to pursue a wide range of stem cell experiments.

The "ban" portion of the "cloning ban" would only involve a procedure that results in a live child created by cloning.

"This ballot summary is grossly deceptive to Missouri voters," Nikolas T. Nikas, general counsel of the Bioethics Defense Fund, said in a LifeSiteNews report recently. "It's like saying that an Initiative 'bans the death penalty' when the measure actually bans only the use of the electric chair, while creating constitutional protection for death by lethal injection."

Missourians Against Human Cloning said the plan that actually will be before voters is one that was created by "giant biotechnology labs that plan to make billions of dollars by cloning humans for research.

"They wanted to guarantee that Missouri lawmakers could never outlaw it. But they knew that most Missourians opposed the idea of creating and destroying human life in a laboratory," the group said. "They came up with a phony definition of 'cloning' and pretended to ban it."

The organization also said the amendment specifically provides for the purchase and sale of human eggs as well as assuring government finances for the work.

The folks promoting the plan, at Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures say the work could "provide cures for many currently incurable or common diseases and injuries, such as diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, sickle cell disease, cancer, heart disease and spinal cord injury."

"Unfortunately, some politicians in Jefferson City have repeatedly tried to pass state laws that would ban and criminalize important types of stem cell research in Missouri – and actually prevent Missouri patients from having access to future stem cell cures that are federally-approved and available to other Americans," the group says.

However, even officials in the biotech industry admit there is no evidence that embryonic stem cells are likely to provide any significant progress against those diseases, and in fact, James Sherley, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology associate professor of biological engineering, is confirming the opposite.

In an article he submitted to The Australian, he decried that nation's reconsideration of a ban on cloning.

"Certainly, if it was wrong to clone human embryos in 2002, it is still wrong today. The basis for some to reverse their position and promote the use of cloned human embryos for research is their belief that embryonic stem cells produced from cloned embryos will yield an amazing medicine chest of new cures for debilitating disease.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," he wrote.

"Embryonic cells cannot be used to replace adult tissues," he said. "Adult stem cells are responsible for the continuous renewal and repair of adult tissues and organs. They accomplish this by dividing to remake themselves and create new cells that mature to carry out the function of the tissue. … Embryonic stem cells cannot replicate in this fashion and the mature cells proposed from them are not sufficiently long-lived to allow effective cures for diseases and injuries."

"Adult stem cell research is a viable and vibrant path to new medical therapies. Even calling them an alternative to embryonic stem cells misinforms the public. Why? Because embryonic stem cells provide no path at all," Sherley wrote.

Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, noted Sherley's expertise and opinion point out a glitch with such research.

"Professor Sherley's statements highlight a major problem with the inhumane and morally reprehensible experiments that Amendment 2 wants the public to subsidize," Pavone said. "They won't work.

"Embryonic stem cells lead to tumors and cancers in human tissue; adult stem cells don't. Now some will object that I'm not a scientist. But that's the point. It doesn't require anything more than common sense to conclude that Amendment 2 should be opposed," Pavone said.

His group is the nation's largest Catholic pro-life organization dedicated to ending abortion and euthanasia.

Another area of concern is the sale and purchase of human eggs. Dr. Robert Lanza, of biotech giant Advanced Cell Technology Inc. has reported that's one of his biggest concerns.

"Without eggs, there's no research," he said in a Los Angeles Times report. But the amendment would allow that, if approved.

In an interview on MercatorNet, Sherley confirmed what biotech companies have been denying.

"Despite the confusion that some like to create on the questions of 'are embryos human beings?' and 'when does a human life being?' both scientists and physicians know very well that human embryos are alive and human.

"A human life begins when a diploid complement of human DNA is initiated to begin human development," he said. "Given that embryos are human beings, they have a right to self and a right to life. Exploiting their parts (ie. cells) or killing them for research is moral trespass that society should not allow. Even if the research might, and let's be clear, might benefit others, this trespass is not justified."

"Proponents of therapeutic cloning have set up reproductive cloning as the greater of two evils and then insisted that the public must choose one. This leaves the public with therapeutic cloning as the lesser evil. In fact, we can decide to reject them both as evils."

He said those who are promoting therapeutic cloning are "protecting their own turf and promoting their own goals with a variety of motivations, including, in some cases, the best intentions of doing public good."