The Osgood File - March 29

(NEW YORK) (WCBS)
Human Cloning Ban

Politicians are not scientists yet sometimes they must make scientific decisions. They are not clergy or ethicists yet sometimes they must make laws involving deeply moral ethical matters. There is in Congress a bill on the subject of human reproductive cloning.

While some say human cloning must be banned, now and forever, others complain that those who oppose it would not be the Columbuses of tomorrow, taking the bold step to discover America.

Among those to testify before a House panel Wednesday was Dr. Panos Zavos, who resigned this month from the University of Kentucky to work on human cloning.

"We are talking about the development of a technology that can give an infertile and childless couple the right to reproduce and have a child and above all complete its life cycle," said Zavos

But at what cost?

Dr. George Siedel of Colorado State University is an animal cloning expert. Among the animals that have been cloned are sheep, cows, pigs, goats and mice.

"There are defects in some of them,” says Seidel. “In lungs, heart and immune system. There are some limb deformities.”

That won't happen with human cloning claims, Dr. Zavos.

"We have no intentions to step over dead bodies or deformed babies to accomplish this,” he said.

"Before you can successfully make a healthy baby through cloning you'll probably have 999 deformed children and or miscarriages so the experimentation with humans is not safe, and it isn't fair,” said Representative Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania, chairman of the House subcommittee that held the hearing.

Dr. Zavos sees human cloning as progress both human and scientific.

"Those that say ban it, those would not be the Neil Armstrong’s that would fly us to the moon and walk us on it," said Zavos.

But that is not how most in Congress see it. It's not how President Bush sees it either.

"The President believes that the moral and ethical issues posed by human cloning are profound and cannot be ignored even in the quest for scientific discovery," said President Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleischer.