Op-Ed: A Clone by Any Other Name

March 10, 2009

Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have asked on more than one occasion, “How many legs does a sheep have if you call its tail a leg?” When the respondent replied, “Five,” Honest Abe had a ready correction, something along the line of, “No, calling a tail a leg does not make it so.”

Abraham Lincoln has had many admirers throughout the years, including President Obama. Now it appears that the nation’s interest in our 16th President has been rekindled. Perhaps we can all learn something anew from this hero: straight talk. Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that President Obama has declared human cloning to be “‘dangerous, profoundly wrong’” and has no place in society.” Further, the report stated that Mr. Obama “would ensure that the government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction.”

I would like to agree with President Obama in calling cloning “dangerous” and “profoundly wrong,” but I don’t think I can for a very basic reason. When one agrees with another, both need to mean the same thing. That is, the words used need to mean the same thing. When President Obama uses the term “cloning” he uses it in an artificially limited way. He apparently uses the term, “cloning” only to indicate the birth of human clones (or at least, the implantation in a uterus of a cloned embryo). This particular example of obfuscation has been around for a while, but that doesn’t mean it should continue to be used. Reproducing embryos asexually for either research or for implantation is cloning. The technology employed is the same; it is simply the dispositions of the embryos that are different. To call one cloning, and the other “not cloning” is either misunderstanding or misrepresenting the science involved. Either is not good where our nation’s policies are concerned.

Here is a test. A scientist uses somatic cell nuclear transfer to produce (asexually) embryos in the lab: four are used for research, and one is implanted in a woman’s uterus. How many embryos have been cloned? President Lincoln, in my estimation, would say “five”.