American stem cell research: politics and policies

Overview

In February of 1997, Dr. Ian Wilmut announced the creation of the first cloned mammal. The report, published in the science journal Nature , described a lamb, "Dolly," which was cloned using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) . This landmark paper and the media attention it received created an immediate reaction from the public and politicians in Washington, D.C. who were concerned about the potential cloning of humans using this technique. Since Dolly’s creation, congressional leaders have been trying to find a way to prevent human cloning and other allegedly unethical medical procedures while still allowing medical research to proceed unhindered.

In late 1998, the issue was further complicated by the announcement from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, led by Dr. James Thomson, who derived the first human embryonic stem cells from blastocysts . This marked the beginning of a new area of medical science, human embryonic stem cell research. With this new breakthrough, the issue of human cloning became considerably more complex, since SCNT was now linked to potential disease-curing research.

With each congressional session, a new crop of conflicting bills arises from both the House and the Senate, and congressional hearings are called to bring witnesses in to validate either side, but no resolution appears to be in sight. Although many polls have shown that the vast majority of Americans disapprove of research which could produce a cloned human (79% in a 2005 poll by Research!America), there is still much public debate about the ethics of embryonic stem cell research. This debate resonates in the Congress and generates the current stalemate where lawmakers are unable to reach a consensus about medical research relating to embryonic stem cells.

Pre-“dolly” regulation

In the 1970s, rules were developed to govern the federal funding of research on human embryos for in vitro fertilization (IVF) . The rules specified that all federally funded research on human embryos would need to be approved by a congressionally appointed ethics advisory board. Although the board met once, it was dissolved in 1980 without ever federally funding embryonic research. In 1993, this rule was rescinded, but the Dickey Amendment, a Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) 1996 appropriation rider, subsequently banned any federal funding of human embryo research and each year this amendment has been attached to the appropriation bill for the DHHS. Since that time, no federal funds have been allowed for embryo (and therefore embryonic stem cell) research, but private funding of research on embryos has been allowed and is completely unregulated.

Post-“dolly” debate

In February of 1997 after the public announcement about “Dolly”, President Clinton charged the National Bioethics Advisory Council (NBAC)    to study the issue of human cloning. In June of that year, NBAC released a report which determined that reproductive cloning was immoral and requested that a moratorium should be established until subsequent laws prohibiting it were passed (with a sunset period of 3-5 years). The members also suggested that the law be written so it would not interfere with biomedical research. Taking their suggestions, President Clinton offered a legislative proposal to bar anyone (either federally or privately funded) from attempting to clone a human through SCNT for 5 years. President Clinton’s proposal was announced after several bills in the House and Senate had already been introduced (see Table 1). However, due to the fear that Congress was acting too quickly and might bar valid research, the majority needed to pass these bills was never attained and thus no legislation limiting such cloning was ever successfully passed into law.