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THE PRESIDENT AND THE BIOTECH CENTURY: A POLICY AGENDA FOR THE BIO QUADRILATERALNigel M. de S. CameronBack in the days before 9/11 it was said that President Bush’s policy on embryonic stem cell funding could prove the defining issue of his presidency. Many Americans have forgotten that he took this as the theme of his first televised broadcast, and – despite 9/11 and its vast impact on every aspect of our lives – he followed it up with a speech in the East Room of the White House in April of 2002, in which he endorsed a ban on all human cloning, whether to produce children or to produce embryos for research. The big question is what happens next. The cloning legislation which twice passed the House has been stalled in the Senate. And while the election has strengthened the hands of those who seek a ban, it is not clear that it has given us a decisive advantage. On the other hand, for those with eyes to see, the global; situation continues to shift: Canada, Australia and France have joined the list of nations with full cloning bans. No-one who is well-informed can any longer claim that this is merely a “pro-life issue.” Conscientious people from left, right and center want it banned. But there is much more on our agenda. At its root, the debate about biotechnology is a debate about what it means to be human. As we engage this issue and that, we have to keep in mind the full picture. Cloning is, as it were, the first salvo in the war for human dignity in the face of developments in biotechnology (and other related technologies) – a struggle that will last well into the “biotech century.” One way of setting out the issues is in a quadrilateral. On one side are the issues that involve the killing of embryos. On a second those that are focused on designing people, making people to order, ultimately reshaping human nature as such. On a third side are questions of eugenics and genetic discrimination – the assessment of people in light of the “color of their genes.” On the fourth: the intellectual property issues that drive the biotech business, and on which we have begun to engage in the matter of the patenting of the human embryo – but we have much further to go; patent law has already come far too close to commodifying who we are. We need policy to be developed and applied, at state and federal levels, on each of the four sides of the bio quadrilateral. We need to project our humane vision for biotechnology around the world through American participation in the multilaterals – the UN General Assembly, where we have been making a powerful case for a cloning ban; UNESCO, which is working on a global bioethics declaration; and many other contexts in which the US is represented and has a powerful influence. It is immediately clear that these are not just “conservative” issues. Genetic discrimination and rolling back intellectual property claims on human cells and tissues have if anything been more important issues to the progressive left, with support from thoughtful persons across the spectrum. Concern about the Brave New World of designer babies, and ultimately wholly re-designed humans, has come from left as much as right. The commodification inherent in human “therapeutic” cloning appalls many in the pro-choice community and among environmentalists (something the US press has tried hard to ignore, which is why hardly anyone reported the Canadian and French cloning bans earlier this year; they are both “Brownback-Landrieu” bans that send you to jail if you do “therapeutic cloning”). These four sets of questions reach back into old business (such as patenting human life) and forward into the technology of tomorrow (nanotechnology is one key: anyone who has not heard of it is falling seriously behind). They raise ignored but scandalous issues (such as the buying and selling of human gametes – eggs and sperm) as well as new and horrific possibilities (such as chimeras – part-human and part-animal beings) and truly unbelievable facts (such as New Jersey’s law, signed last January, that permits the citizens of that state to implant cloned embryos in the womb, experiment on them, use them to supply organs and tissues – as long as they are never born alive). Some months ago, the President’s Council on Bioethics issued two quite fascinating reports – Beyond Therapy, which looks at the potential for biotechnology to change us, and Reproduction and Responsibility, which focuses on how to stop the worst excesses of irresponsible biotech. Every thoughtful reader of Biotech Update should get hold of these reports and read them (see www.bioethics.gov). So what are we hoping for? Three things. First, we need above all else clear presidential leadership in the struggle for sane biotechnology and the centrality of human dignity. President Bush told the assembled scientists and executives of the Biotechnology Industry Organization recently that they were called to a moral calling. He has declared that cloning is a watershed issue as we embark on the biotech century, and he called just this fall at the United Nations General Assembly for a global cloning ban. The President’s intuitions on these issues are plainly those of many of us: we are pro-technology, and pro-business, but we are not quite mad! We do not want biotech to undercut human dignity or to engage in unethical research. That is his view, and he needs to find many venues in which to set it out, so that our national debate on the greatest domestic policy issues of our generation can be as healthy and informed as his own perspectives. Second, we need legislative action on many questions – not just cloning, though that remains vital; but also genetic discrimination (on, which, if we can agree on abortion-neutral language, there is strong support from both parties and pro-choice as well as pro-life opinion). We need continued pressure for intellectual property reform – human embryos and genes should not be the subject of patent claims. We need to ban “humanzees” and other Dr. Moreau-type possibilities before some disingenuous politician gets in front of a mike and tells us that they will give us “cures.” We need to prevent putting human embryos into animals, and animals into humans, and anything into a woman’s uterus that is not the biological product of one man and one woman. Some of this legislation can be federal, some can be in the states. Third, we need to press our case in the multilaterals, and work with those many other nations who like us desire sanity in biotechnology and have no wish to be swept up into the denial of human dignity in the supposed interests of business. These are global issues, and ultimately we need global standards if we are to contain the worst excesses of unethical science and disreputable business. More than 60 states joined us in seeking a cloning ban at the UN, and some of those who have opposed us have their own domestic bans already in law. We need to work with Germany, whose national conscience marks the nation with the sanest biotech laws in the world. (Not many Americans know that Germans of all parties, including socialists and greens, wrote to Senator Kerry during the campaign to ask him to endorse the Bush position on cloning.) We need to learn from the Canadians, who recently passed a package of bio legislation that had been many years in the making. We need to heed the developing world, where nations are fearful of being used by western biotech companies as test-beds for their products, and where they don’t need high-tech cures but clean water and antibiotics. These are among our expectations, and we do not have long. The steady rise of the exponential curve of biotech development continues. Yet we have leadership in the House, the Senate, and the White House in the hands of men and women who have some idea of how high are the stakes for which we are playing – the nature of human being itself. We must work and pray to ensure that understand also how urgent is this task.
Director, Wilberforce Forum’s Council for Biotechnology Policy (www.biotechpolicy.org) |
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