Ethics and Cloning

In the wake of the announcement by Ian Wilmott and the Scotland-based Roslin Institute that an adult sheep had been cloned, some perfectly reasonable clinicians and ethicists began Sunday to spin tales of interesting possibilities and profound dangers that seemed bound to emerge from human applications for cloning. One ethicist proposed that families might seek to replace dying children with cloned copies. A geneticist suggested that clones would provide precisely matched transplant organs to their sick siblings. As the story unfolded in earnest on Monday, a cacophony of "experts on cloning" emerged, each eager to answer the questions, "Is cloning of human beings possible? Could it ever be moral? Should it be illegal?" It understandable that society wants answers to these questions, especially after this discovery emerged from virtual thin air. But they are the wrong questions. The cloning of a sheep, and the subsequent cloning of experts about cloning of humans, raises a set of real issues about clinical and biomedical research that will not be resolved by a law banning clones or even a commission on cloning.

One issue is a change in the conduct of biomedical research in the past 10 years. If you are wondering why you didn't know about cloning until after it had already been completed, you are on the right track. Science has always been competitive and there have always been incentives to keep the experiment quiet until the last minute. But the rules about when and how to release information have radically changed in the past few years. No longer is biomedical science primarily characterized by an open and constant exchange of information about ongoing experiments and their status. Today the more common phenomenon is virtual isolation of research teams from each other and from the community until the moment when results are viewed as significant in terms of their marketability. Marketability? In science? You may have noticed that in virtually every interview of Dr. Wilmott, the initials PPL were clearly visible directly behind him, corresponding to the British stock acronym for PPL Therapeutics, the pharmacology company that funded Dr. Wilmott's labs and who owns patents (filed just before publication of his article) for the technologies that led to Dolly. In the few short years since the passage of the U.S. Technology Transfer Act, it has become both legal and commonplace around the world for scientists who are funded by the Federal government to have a financial stake in firms that patent and sell the products of their research. As a result, these biomedical researchers must work under rules that outlaw insider trading, which require disclosure of information that investors know to materially affect the value of their stock. In 1975, working under the old rules of science, PPL might have cloned five or six sheep before declaring their results in a scientific journal, in 1997 one cloned ewe constitutes enough of a change in the market value of PPL to virtually force the research into the media. The transfer from science to technology has become so quick and seamless that there is no longer a pause by scientists or others to think about what has been done and how to take it foreward. Before we even know whether or not this research can be duplicated by PPL or others, products have been patented and cloning is well on its way to market.

Bioethicists have speculated that glory and lucre are the source of biomedical science's turn to the rules of the market. Instead, I suspect that scientists with the best of intentions have been misled into believing that all they need to understand is how to do their experiments, leaving ethics to the bioethicists. This of course is folly. Cloning presents all sorts of obvious political and ethical issues, and it is equally obvious that Wilmott and his team should have sought much more broad consensus before cloning an adult mammal. In this respect biomedical science has not learned from this century's revolution in clinical medicine. While American medical schools have put a great deal of emphasis on training young clinicians to identify conflicts of interest, to learn ethics, and to think more generally about the moral and political meaning of their profession, the average scientist to this day receives-in his lifetime-no more than a couple of hours of training in the history, politics, and ethics of science. We need to recover the scientific ethic of openness, which holds that not everything worth doing must be done in secret and at top speed. This ethic makes better science, not only because it insists on replicating results but also because it emphasizes community and responsibility. Ethics courses will not stop cloning. But neither will a national ban. And cloning will doubtless turn out to be useful. The right question, though, is whether we want ethical answers about cloning to come from bioethicists after the science is announced, or among scientists and the community before, during and after we release our biomedical genies from their bottles.

Glenn McGee, PhD 215-898-3453
http://www.med.upenn.edu/bioethics
Graduate Studies Director & Assistant Professor
University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics
& Senior Fellow, Wharton School LDI