Time for an Investigation
EDITORIAL Time for an Investigation If President Bush knows what's good for the country—and we think he does—he will immediately appoint an independent, blue-ribbon commission to investigate the...
...Similar patent applications are pending...
...The third reason we need an investigation is that the system did not work...
...They can't be precise about what they did or didn't know without revealing classified information...
...They are fictions...
...They will say that it is only the 14-day-old cloned embryos that they want...
...Then he should get back to the business of winning the war...
...Isn't President Bush troubled...
...And they will say that it is only to save your dying mother or dying child that they want them...
...Isn't anyone troubled by the fact that if the failure stemmed partly from incompetence, then the incompetent people are still at their vitally important posts...
...But the cat is out of the bag...
...William Kristol and Robert Kagan Brave New Patents Over the past year, the president, Congress, and the nation have been engaged in a serious public debate on human cloning...
...We only know that it did...
...Isn't it possible that some people should be reprimanded, or even lose their jobs, when 3,000 Americans are killed in a terrorist attack...
...Furthermore, regardless of what Congress does, the president should order an investigation for the sake of accountability within the executive branch...
...In all this time, no one bothered to check with the U.S...
...it claims to establish regulations on the use of cloned embryos, when in fact it shields such research from future regulation...
...There are three reasons such an investigation is necessary...
...Ever since September 11 we have been troubled and puzzled that almost no one in the government seems to have been held responsible—much less, heaven forbid, stepped forward to assume responsibility—for failure...
...Nor can we assume that the investigation already in progress by a special joint congressional committee will do the trick...
...EDITORIAL Time for an Investigation If President Bush knows what's good for the country—and we think he does—he will immediately appoint an independent, blue-ribbon commission to investigate the government's failure to anticipate and adequately prepare for the terrorist attacks of September 11...
...Surely much of the fault lies with the patent-holding researchers themselves...
...In short, these bills do not really ban human cloning...
...They could easily have included the word "nonhuman" before the word "mammal" in their patent application, in which they request patent ownership of the "living, cloned products produced by each of the methods described herein...
...But the fact that no one in the Patent Office or the administration seemed to know such a patent existed—or that those who knew about it and approved it did not seem to understand or care about what they were doing— suggests how urgent legislative action on both human cloning and the patenting of human life really is...
...And the biotech industry needs to denounce the reckless excesses of some of its members, which so far it has instead labored and lobbied to defend...
...They would allow the technology of human cloning to develop...
...they would lead to the creation of large numbers of cloned embryos...
...Both of these bills would end up aiding the very thing they claim to ban: reproductive cloning...
...President Bush should follow that war president's lead...
...In an effort to avoid taking a position on the creation and use of cloned embryos, it ends up allowing the implantation of cloned embryos into human, animal, or artificial wombs, where they might be left to develop into later-stage fetuses, and then mined for tissue or organs...
...They are not compromises...
...Can it really be that no one made a mistake...
...For the past eight months the Bush administration has essentially been saying that everything and everyone worked just fine...
...In the military, officers resign when something goes wrong on their watch, even if they were personally blameless for what happened...
...It redefines human cloning as the implantation of a cloned embryo...
...The second bill, sponsored by Senator Byron Dorgan, is equally bad...
...We understand the conundrum that administration spokesmen face...
...Which is to say, it turns human life into a commodity—to be made, manipulated, exploited, and destroyed...
...People lose jobs in government for hiring nannies and forgetting to pay their taxes...
...If it was the system that failed, then Given the vulgar partisanship into which most elected officials descended last week, we have no confidence that any congressional committee can come up with a reputable and authoritative report...
...What we have to do now is to find out what the president, what the White House, knew about the events leading up to 9/11, when they knew it, and, most importantly, what was done about it at that time," said Dick Gephardt smarmily, desperately trying to fasten blame on the president a la Watergate...
...Either we didn't have the intelligence we should have had before September 11...
...The carefully worded and evasive statements by various administration spokesmen in response to the report of the president's August 6 CIA briefing have raised as many questions as they have answered...
...In other words, they want to make human clones, harvest their organs, and own the rights to their children...
...We don't know where the system broke down...
...And, of course, it's perilous...
...It might as well be called the "Human Embryo Cloning Promotion Act of 2002...
...That is absurd and unsustainable...
...The first is sponsored by senators Arlen Specter, Ted Kennedy, Dianne Feinstein, and Orrin Hatch, and it is a masterpiece of disingenuousness...
...Make George Shultz and Sam Nunn co-chairmen...
...It has featured congressional hearings, industry lobbying, a House vote banning all human cloning, and months of delay and equivocation in the Senate...
...should that same system be left in place because no one is willing to take a hard look at how and why it failed...
...Give the commission full and unfettered access to all intelligence from the CIA and FBI and to all relevant internal administration documents...
...And we risk being so deluded by the supposed goodness of our intentions that we do not realize the Brave New World we are making, until it is too late...
...Was what happened on September 11 the consequence of everyone doing their job perfectly...
...Or the intelligence was assembled but wasn't taken seriously enough...
...We understand, too, why the president's supporters are reluctant to demand an investigation...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the first—just after Pearl Harbor...
...Stuart Newman, founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics, put it well in testimony before the Senate: "Once we have clonal embryos for a while and have gotten used to the idea, who would turn a deaf ear to calls by patients and their loved ones for these superior therapeutics...
...But are we really to trust as benefactors those who would so unapologetically request the legal right to turn their fellow men and women into property...
...and their claimed prohibition on reproductive cloning would be legally unenforceable—short of forced abortions—if one of these embryos were to be implanted...
...And if someone did make a mistake, shouldn't that someone be held accountable, just a little...
...But he's wrong...
...William Kristol...
...It now turns out that a patent was granted more than a year ago to researchers at the University of Missouri for mammal and human reproductive cloning—a discovery we owe to Andrew Kimbrell of the International Center for Technology Assessment, which has done heroic work making sense of this and other Brave New World patents...
...Of course, those who seek such patents will tell us that this is not their intention...
...Though the patent was not formally granted until April 3, 2001, the decision to grant it was made before President Bush was elected and before his choice, former congressman Jim Rogan, became director of the Patent Office...
...But they did not limit themselves to animals...
...For example, a group of researchers from Massachusetts has applied for a patent that allows them "to use tissues derived from NT [i.e., cloned] embryos, fetuses or offspring, including human and ungulate tissues," and to own the patent rights to the "progeny of the [cloned] offspring...
...and it puts the government in the novel and unsavory position of endorsing the creation of cloned human embryos and then mandating their destruction...
...It's precisely because we're in a war that we need an investigation to find out where we failed...
...And this leaves us with the third culprit in this case: the Senate leadership, which promised in February, then in March, then in April, then in May, promptly to consider legislation, proposed by senators Sam Brownback and Mary Landrieu, banning all human cloning, legislation which passed in the House by over 100 votes...
...The Senate needs to pass a real ban on human cloning...
...It was nauseating last week to watch Democratic politicians trying to score cheap points against President Bush, treating this most serious of questions as if it were another made-to-order Washington scandal...
...Given the vulgar partisanship into which most elected officials descended last week, we have no confidence that any congressional committee can come up with a reputable and authoritative report...
...Are we to stand by and watch—in naive disbelief or naive inaction— as the precedent for a new, inhuman commerce in human beings is established and normalized...
...Unfortunately, the Bush administration, too, has gone into scandal mode—into a defensive crouch...
...Indeed, in just the last year we have seen how quickly moral lines dissolve in the face of promised medical progress...
...We understand the administration's reluctance to go through this wrenching process...
...Or the information was not adequately distributed and therefore key signals were missed...
...Instruct the commission to produce a public report in six months that can stand as the definitive judgment of what went wrong and why...
...They wanted control over human clones, too...
...Congress and the president need to develop and pass legislation making it illegal—or making clear that it is already illegal—to patent human embryos, human fetuses, or human beings...
...First, the administration is now in danger of looking as if it has engaged in a cover-up...
...There are two other bills in the Senate that also claim to ban human cloning...
...The University of Missouri patent seems to include exclusive rights to the cloned embryos, cloned fetuses, and cloned children that their new process might one day create...
...It is now time to consider the details and the facts...
...Patent and Trademark Office...
...They will say their critics are crying wolf...
...This is a moment when all parties need to act decisively and responsibly...
...Vice President Dick Cheney came out swinging, claiming that any criticism, even a call for an investigation of the administration's actions before September 11, was "thoroughly irresponsible . . . in a time of war...
...Who would turn away from "improved products of this work, up to and including full-term clones from which to harvest organs...
...If we do not, we risk allowing the making of monsters, and we risk becoming monsters...
...At the press conference when senators Specter, Kennedy, Feinstein, and Hatch announced the release of their pro-research cloning legislation, Specter was asked when a cloned embryo could no longer be used morally for research...
...We also presume the administration has nothing to hide...
...Surely the first step in fixing the system—and thereby defending ourselves against the next attack—is to identify what went wrong or who performed badly...
...We have seen how the need to use only embryos "left over" from in vitro fertilization (which are going to die anyway, advocates said) has become the need to create cloned embryos explicitly for research and destruction...
...Or it was taken seriously but insufficient action was taken to prevent an attack...
...After Pearl Harbor, there were half a dozen such investigations...
...They want to use some human beings as raw materials to help others...
...The ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Shelby, says that "we've just scratched the surface...
...The country needs to be assured that a reputable and unbiased group is going beneath the surface to find the truth...
...And we can imagine how the need for cloned embryos will soon become the need for later-term cloned fetuses—something these patents anticipate and endorse...
...He replied: "I have not found it helpful to get into the details...
Vol. 7 • May 2002 • No. 36
