By Lisa Seachrist

Washington Editor

WASHINGTON -- With a May 26 deadline looming, the President's commission weighing the ethics of human cloning is leaning toward recommending a continuation of the moratorium on research into creating a human clone rather than an outright legislative ban.

As a result of the concern raised with the announcement of the sheep-clone, Dolly, President Clinton requested that the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) devise policy recommendations for regulating cloning research.

Given the current state of knowledge about the techniques that produced Dolly and the questions about the risks of that procedure to a human clone, the commission is in agreement that it would be unethical to clone a human.

"It is wrong to permit, for the indefinite future, the production of a human clone using nuclear transfer technology," R. Alta Charo, professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.

While still in the process of drafting their recommendations, the committee weighed the enforceability of legislation against the challenges of drafting legislation that would protect other forms of research.

"As a scientist, my instinct is not to legislate research," Carol Greider, senior staff scientist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, said. "It seems like it is too easy to have unintended consequences on legitimate research."

The committee is entertaining a plan where they would recommend continuing the moratorium on using federal money to conduct research aimed at producing a human clone, assure any research using humans in the U.S. includes protections for subjects, and call for a voluntary moratorium by private researchers and clinicians. In addition, the commission is likely to recommend a reviewing body to examine cloning efforts in an ethical context.

The commission also discussed a plan that would create legislation banning the creation of a human clone and the research requisite to creating such a clone. In addition, the legislation would have a sunset clause that would reopen debate on the issue periodically.

Charo said enacting legislation would invite a legal challenge opening the law to interpretation by the courts. A moratorium created by executive order, on the other hand, would be unassailable by those means. However, a moratorium doesn't have the teeth of the criminal justice system should a researcher or physician ignore the ban.

"It would seem to me that we would have to rely on the professional societies like the American Medical Association and state licensing boards to enforce our ban," Ezekial Emanuel, associate professor of medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said.

Alexander Capron, co-director of the Pacific Center for Health Policy and Ethics at the University of Southern California Law Center in Los Angeles, agreed, noting that "a voluntary ban means non-legislative and the question is whether existing malpractice and licensure laws will be the means by which it is enforced."

Bernard Lo, director of the program in medical ethics at the University of California, San Francisco, pointed out that in the history of reproductive innovations, which has relied on these organizations to regulate physician behavior, there have been a number of unsavory incidents that society could do nothing to prevent.

Charo, however, asserted that the organization could provide a significant deterrent. Should these organizations clearly state that cloning was research and therefore outside the standard of medical care, they could yank the licenses of physicians who violate the ban and prevent them from practicing medicine.

Nevertheless, David R. Cox, professor of genetics and pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine, noted, "I am so worried about the effectiveness of the stick that legislation is really attractive to me."

The commission requested input from a variety of individuals and organizations in order to weigh the pros and cons of various actions. Noting the history of voluntary moratoria in the field of biotechnology, the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) supported a continuing moratorium on the production of a human clone.

In a written statement to the commission, BIO recommended that the commission resolve to continue the voluntary ban while exempting the use of nuclear transfer technology "used to improve scientific understanding short of developing an entire human being."

BIO also called on the commission to discourage state legislators from developing legislation banning cloning. "These issues need to be addressed on a uniform, national basis," BIO President Carl Feldbaum told BioWorld Today. "A patchwork of laws could undermine medical research in this country."

The commission expects to release its recommendations near the end of this month. *