SOCIETY FOR REPRODUCTIVE MEDICINE TAKES AMBIVALENT STAND

January 21, 1998

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Fertility doctors worried about bad laws that would limit research suggested their own law for banning human cloning Tuesday.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine said its carefully worded legislation would ban the cloning of humans without without restricting research that could help infertile couples and advance other areas of medicine.

"It is important that in passing a cloning prohibition, future research into infertility and many other debilitating diseases is not in any way impeded," Benjamin Younger, who heads the group of 9,700 gynecologists, obstetricians and fertility experts, said in a statement.

"Only through research can we find improved techniques and treatments that will help the more than six million Americans who suffer the pain of not being able to bear a child."

The trouble with any law banning "cloning" is that the term is widely used to mean many different procedures. When genes are copied they are "cloned," cells can be cloned and embryos can be cloned.

What most people oppose is the process that led to the creation of Dolly, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, being used to make human clone babies.

The ASRM's proposed law specifies this procedure.

"It shall be unlawful for any person to create a human child using somatic cell nuclear transfer," the proposal, presented at a news conference, reads.

Somatic cell nuclear transfer refers to the technique scientists in Scotland used to make Dolly -- the transfer of the nucleus of a fully adult cell into an egg cell. It would also cover the use of cells from a human fetus to make a clone.

The ASRM proposal also seeks to preempt any state law banning cloning. Florida legislators in 1997 withdrew a bill that biotechnology companies said would have destroyed their industry in the state, while fertility experts complained a California law that did pass banned much of their research.

For instance, Dr. Jamie Grifo of New York University has been experimenting on techniques that would help infertile women by transferring the nuclei of their own faulty eggs into hollowed-out eggs of another woman -- using cloning technology but producing a baby that has the genes of both mother and father.

"If legislation is passed that says we cannot do this, this stops the research," he told Reuters in a recent interview.

The ASRM proposals address this worry. "Nothing in this Act shall restrict other areas of biomedical and agricultural research, including but not limited to important and promising work that involves the use of somatic cell nuclear transfer or other cloning technologies, to clone molecules, DNA, cells and tissues; or the use of somatic cell nuclear transfer techniques to develop animals," it reads.

The issue of cloning humans reignited earlier this month when a Chicago-area scientist said he wanted to set up fertility clinics to clone people.

U.S. President Clinton said he would press for legislation banning any such thing, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it has authority to prohibit such research.

Massachusetts researchers said on Monday they had produced calves that were not only clones, but genetically altered. They hope such animals will one day produce human proteins in their milk that could be used as medicines.