Christian doctors condemn stem-cell experiments

Dolly was the first animal sucessfully cloned

The nation's largest faith-based group of physicians condemned human cloning experiments by Hwang Woo-suk of South Korea and Ian Wilmut of Britain's Edinburgh Medical School, saying they should be halted for ethical and medical reasons.

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"In just a few short years since the cloning of Dolly the sheep, we have witnessed a breathtaking jump to cloning and destroying human beings," said Dr. David Stevens, executive director of the Christian Medical Association. "These researchers don't seem to recognize the difference between human beings and barnyard animals."

Hwang reportedly cloned and destroyed the world's first human embryos for stem cells last year, and Wilmut cloned 'Dolly' the sheep in 1998. Thursday they announced a partnership in cloning experiments.

In South Korea, government-funded researchers reported producing human embryos through cloning and then extracting their stem cells. The experiments signaled a major advancement toward growing patients' own replacement tissue to treat diseases.

Stevens said the new experiments will use human beings like lab rats to study diseases.

"Is this how we want the human race to be treated – as mere fodder for scientific experimentation?" he asked.

Stevens contends researchers and reporters are using misleading rhetoric. He insists the experiments are not merely cloning cells, "they are cloning living human beings and then destroying them for their stem cells."

"Each one of us began life as a human embryo," he said. "If you had been sacrificed for your stem cells at that point of development, you wouldn’t exist today."

Dr. Gene Rudd, CMA associate executive director, argued that even if researchers somehow were to determine a potential therapy through cloning, any treatment would require harvesting massive numbers of eggs from women.

"That would mean subjecting literally millions of women to the risks involved in high-dose hormonal stimulation to cause hyper-ovulation," he said. "Women can experience permanent side effects or even death."

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Stevens said the "rush to embryonic stem cell research and its associated human cloning may fill the pockets of researchers, but it is highly unlikely to match their hype about cures."

"Embryonic stem cells have been shown to be highly unstable and difficult to control, and they tend to form tumors," he explained.

Meanwhile, he argued, adult stem cells – obtained, without ethical objections, from sources such as cord blood – already have provided treatments for patients suffering from more than 50 diseases.

Stevens pointed out that if Hwang and Wilmut had done their experiments in Canada, Germany or France they would have been put in jail for five to seven years.

The U.S., however, has no law prohibiting human cloning.

In California and New Jersey, he notes, human cloning is permitted as long as the human beings created are destroyed.

"Only a true federal ban on all forms of human cloning will halt this madness," Stevens said.

President Bush said yesterday he would veto legislation that would loosen restrictions on embryonic stem cell research.

"I'm very concerned about cloning," the president said. "I worry about a world in which cloning becomes accepted."

White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy said the work in South Korea "represents exactly what we're opposed to."