The following testimony is abridged. You are viewing a mere skeleton.

The fullness of its wisdom can be found here.

Testimony Before
United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary
Subcommittee on Crime
on
“The Ethics of Cloning”
June 7, 2001

Testimony of Leon R. Kass, M.D., Ph.D.*

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee. My name is Leon Kass, and I am the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago. Originally trained both as a physician and a biochemist, I have for more than thirty years been professionally concerned with the social and ethical implications of biomedical advance. In fact, my first writing in this area, in 1967, was on the moral dangers of human cloning. I am therefore very grateful for the opportunity to testify before this Committee on the ethics of human cloning and in support of HR 1644, the “Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001.” And I am profoundly grateful to Rep. Weldon and the many co-sponsors of this bill for their vision in recognizing the momentous choice now before us and for their courage in stepping forward to protect us from what is surely a very great danger to the future of our humanity.
My testimony takes the form of an essay written precisely to gain support for such a bill....I begin by calling attention to what is humanly at stake in the decision about human cloning.... I argue that we stand now at a major fork in the road, compelled to decide whether we wish to travel down the path to the Brave New World....Once embryonic clones are produced in laboratories, the eugenic revolution will have begun. And we shall have lost our best chance to do anything about it.... I heartily endorse HR 1644....

The urgency of the great political struggles of the twentieth century.... seems to have blinded many people to a deeper and ultimately darker truth .... all contemporary societies are travelling briskly in the same utopian direction. All are wedded to the modern technological project.... Leading the triumphal procession is modern medicine, which is daily becoming ever more powerful.... thanks especially to astonishing achievements in biomedical science and technology—achievements for which we must surely be grateful.
Yet contemplating present and projected advances....we now clearly recognize new uses for biotechnical power that soar beyond the traditional medical goals.... Human nature itself lies on the operating table, ready for alteration....

In leading laboratories.... new creators are confidently amassing their powers and quietly honing their skills, while on the street their evangelists are zealously prophesying a post-human future....

Some transforming powers are already here....

Years ago Aldous Huxley saw it coming. In his charming but disturbing novel, Brave New World....he made its meaning strikingly visible for all to see....Huxley depicts human life seven centuries hence, living under the gentle hand of humanitarianism rendered fully competent.... The Brave New World has achieved prosperity, community, stability, and nigh-universal contentment, only to be peopled by creatures of human shape but stunted humanity.... Brave New Man is so dehumanized that he does not even recognize what has been lost.

Huxley’s novel, of course, is science fiction.... But the kinships are disquieting....

In Huxley’s novel, everything proceeds under the direction of an omnipotent—albeit benevolent—world state. Yet the dehumanization that he portrays does not really require despotism or external control....we can reach the same humanly debased condition solely on the basis of free human choice....give us the technological imperative, liberal democratic society, compassionate humanitarianism, moral pluralism, and free markets, and we can take ourselves to a Brave New World all by ourselves....

Some among us are delighted, of course, by this state of affairs: some scientists and biotechnologists, their entrepreneurial backers, and a cheering claque of sci-fi enthusiasts, futurologists, and libertarians....

Yet for all our disquiet, we have until now done nothing to prevent it..... Denial and despair, unattractive outlooks in any situation, become morally reprehensible when circumstances summon us to keep the world safe for human flourishing.....

... it will not be easy for us to do so.... there are indeed many features of modern life that will conspire to frustrate efforts aimed at the human control of the biomedical project.

First, we Americans believe in technological automatism: where we do not foolishly believe that all innovation is progress, we fatalistically believe that it is inevitable....

Second, we believe in freedom: the freedom of scientists to inquire, the freedom of technologists to develop, the freedom of entrepreneurs to invest and to profit, the freedom of private citizens to make use of existing technologies to satisfy any and all personal desires....

Third, the biomedical enterprise occupies the moral high ground of compassionate humanitarianism, upholding the supreme values of modern life—cure disease, prolong life, relieve suffering—in competition with which other moral goods rarely stand a chance....

....Our cultural pluralism and easygoing relativism make it difficult to reach consensus on what we should embrace and what we should oppose....Since we live in a democracy, moreover, we face political difficulties in gaining a consensus to direct our future....we are in danger of forgetting what we have to lose, humanly speaking.

....our situation is far from hopeless.... Though we favor freedom of inquiry, we recognize that experiments are deeds and not speeches, and we prohibit experimentation on human subjects without their consent, even when cures from disease might be had by unfettered research
....Our moral pluralism notwithstanding, national commissions and review bodies have sometimes reached moral consensus to recommend limits on permissible scientific research and technological application....

....we have nationally prohibited commercial traffic in organs for transplantation, even though a market would increase the needed supply.... the majority of Americans are not yet so degraded or so cynical as to fail to be revolted by the society depicted in Huxley’s novel....

... it would be disgraceful to concede defeat even before we enter the fray....sometimes we come to a clear fork in the road where decision is possible....Events have conspired to provide us with a perfect opportunity to seize the initiative....I refer to the prospect of human cloning....

Four years ago I addressed this subject....Subsequent events have only strengthened my conviction.... my emphasis this time is more practical.... I am more interested in encouraging those who oppose human cloning but who think that we are impotent to prevent it, and in mobilizing them to support new and solid legislative efforts to stop it....
For we have here a golden opportunity to exercise some control over where biology is taking us....Now may be as good a chance as we will ever have to get our hands on the wheel of the runaway train now headed for a post-human world....

Revulsion is not an argument; and some of yesterday’s repugnances are today calmly accepted—not always for the better. In some crucial cases, however, repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power completely to articulate it....

I suggest that our repugnance at human cloning belongs in this category. We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings not because of the strangeness or the novelty of the undertaking, but because we intuit and we feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear.

....In this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, and in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational will, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.

Yet repugnance need not stand naked before the bar of reason. The wisdom of our horror at human cloning can be at least partially articulated, even if this is finally one of those instances about which the heart has its reasons that reason cannot entirely know. I offer four objections to human cloning:

that it constitutes unethical experimentation;

that it threatens identity and individuality;

that it turns procreation into manufacture (especially when understood as the harbinger of manipulations to come);

and that it means despotism over children and perversion of parenthood.

Please note: I speak only about so-called reproductive cloning....The objections that may be raised against creating (or using) embryos for research are entirely independent of whether the research embryos are produced by cloning.

We have here a perfect example of the logic of the slippery slope. The principle of reproductive freedom currently enunciated by the proponents of cloning logically embraces the ethical acceptability of sliding all the way down: to producing children wholly in the laboratory from sperm to term...

If you think that such scenarios require outside coercion or governmental tyranny, you are mistaken....The so-called science-fiction cases—say, Brave New World—make vivid the meaning of what looks to us, mistakenly, to be benign. They reveal that what looks like compassionate humanitarianism is, in the end, crushing dehumanization

....human cloning is unethical in itself and dangerous in its likely consequences.... the overwhelming majority of our fellow Americans remain firmly opposed to cloning human beings.

....What should we do about it?....What we should do is work to prevent human cloning by making it illegal.
We should aim for a global legal ban, if possible, and for a unilateral national ban at a minimum.... renegade scientists may secretly undertake to violate such a law, but we can deter them by both criminal sanctions and monetary penalties....

Michigan, for example, has made it a felony, punishable by imprisonment for not more than ten years or a fine of not more than $10 million, or both, to “intentionally engage in or attempt to engage in human cloning,” where human cloning means “the use of human somatic cell nuclear transfer technology to produce a human embryo.” ....

Two major anti-cloning bills were introduced into the Senate in 1998. The Democratic bill (Kennedy-Feinstein) would have banned so-called reproductive cloning by prohibiting transfer of cloned embryos into women to initiate pregnancy. The Republican bill (Frist-Bond) would have banned all cloning by prohibiting the creation even of embryonic human clones. Both sides opposed “reproductive cloning,” the attempt to bring to birth a living human child who is the clone of someone now (or previously) alive. But the Democratic bill sanctioned creating cloned embryos for research purposes, and the Republican bill did not.... Owing to a deep and unbridgeable gulf over the question of embryo research, we did not get the congressional ban on reproductive cloning...

....I now believe that what we need is an all-out ban on human cloning, including the creation of embryonic clones....all halfway measures will prove to be morally, legally, and strategically flawed....Anyone truly serious about preventing human reproductive cloning must seek to stop the process from the beginning....
.... Creating cloned human children...necessarily begins by producing cloned human embryos. Preventing the latter would prevent the former....Yet some scientists favor embryo cloning as a way of obtaining embryos for research or as sources of cells and tissues for the possible benefit of others. ...
The prospect of creating new human life solely to be exploited in this way has been condemned on moral grounds by many people....

A ban only on reproductive cloning would turn out to be unenforceable. Once cloned embryos were produced and available.... it would be virtually impossible to control what was done with them.... Huge stockpiles of cloned human embryos could thus be produced and bought and sold without anyone knowing it....
Assisted reproduction takes place within the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship.... Many infertility experts probably would obey the law, but others could and would defy it with impunity.... Moreover, the transfer of embryos to begin a pregnancy is a simple procedure....
Even should the deed become known, governmental attempts to enforce the reproductive ban would run into a swarm of moral and legal challenges...

.... the only practically effective and legally sound approach is to block human cloning at the start, at the production of the embryo clone....

Some....may balk at such a comprehensive restriction. They want to get their hands on those embryos, especially for their stem cells.... It is the promise of rejection-free tissues for transplantation that so far has been the most successful argument in favor of experimental cloning.

Yet new discoveries have shown that we can probably obtain the same benefits without embryo cloning....
Numerous recent studies have shown that it is possible to obtain highly potent stem cells from the bodies of children and adults.... Beyond all expectations, these non-embryonic stem cells have been shown to have the capacity to turn into a wide variety of specialized cells and tissues. (At the same time, early human therapeutic efforts with stem cells derived from embryos have produced some horrible results.... Since cells derived from our own bodies are more easily and cheaply available than cells harvested from specially manufactured clones, we will almost surely be able to obtain from ourselves any needed homologous transplantable cells and tissues.... By pouring our resources into adult stem cell research....we can also avoid the morally and legally vexing issues in embryo research....

A few weeks ago an excellent federal anti-cloning bill was introduced in Congress, sponsored by Senator Sam Brownback and Representative David Weldon. This carefully drafted legislation seeks to prevent the cloning of human beings at the very first step, by prohibiting somatic cell nuclear transfer to produce embryonic clones, and provides substantial criminal and monetary penalties for violating the law....it offers us the best chance—the only realistic chance—that we have to keep human cloning from happening...
Getting this bill passed will not be easy....

.... let us be clear about the urgency of our situation.... Scientists and doctors.... are today working to clone human beings. They are aware of the immediate hazards, but they are undeterred.... They are prepared to gamble with the well-being of any live-born clones.... all for the glory of being the first to replicate a human being.... our silence can only mean acquiescence. To do nothing now is to accept the responsibility for the deed and for all that follows predictably in its wake.
I appreciate that a federal legislative ban on human cloning is without American precedent.... Perhaps such a ban will prove ineffective; perhaps it will eventually be shown to have been a mistake. (If so, it could later be reversed.)... Even if cloning is rarely undertaken, a society in which it is tolerated is no longer the same society—any more than is a society that permits (even small-scale) incest or cannibalism or slavery....

But the present danger posed by human cloning is, paradoxically, also a golden opportunity.... we can strike a blow for the human control of the technological project.... The prospect of human cloning, so repulsive to contemplate, is the occasion for deciding whether we shall be slaves of unregulated innovation, and ultimately its artifacts.... The humanity of the human future is now in our hands.