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Motions on Cloning Passed by the General Assembly on 22 May 1997The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland :1. Commend the principle of the production of proteins of therapeutic value in the milk of genetically modified sheep and other farm animals, but oppose, and urge Her Majesty's Government to take necessary steps to prevent, the application of animal cloning as a routine procedure in meat and milk production, as an unacceptable commodification of animals. 2. Reaffirm their belief in the basic dignity and uniqueness of each human being under God. Express the strongest possible opposition to the cloning of human beings and urge Her Majesty's Government to press for a comprehensive international treaty to ban it worldwide. |
The Director of the Church of Scotland's Society, Religion and Technology Project quickly became a focus for ethical comment, with numerous TV, radio, newspaper and magazine interviews and articles, including BBC's Newsnight and Heart of the Matter programmes, and German and Dutch national television. These opportunities arose because the SRT Project was already involved in assessing the issue, having for the last three years had an expert working group on the ethical issues of genetic engineering, one of whose members is the Roslin scientist who "produced" Dolly, Dr Ian Wilmut. As a result, SRT was in a unique position to offer informed and balanced comment to the world's media, and to influence the course of a debate in which sensation and ill-judged speculation were rife.
A very significant development was the fact that quite a lot of media picked up SRT's involvement from the Internet. This was because Dr Bruce had an written article on the ethics of cloning at the time of the first Roslin cloning discovery a year before, and had included this in SRT's own site on the World Wide Web. When the news broke, press agencies like CNN News searched for "cloning" on the Internet and found SRT's article as one of very few in existence. They put in a link to SRT from the own site, and all the world has since been following the trail - a month later, the SRT article was still receiving 400 Internet "visits" every day. This speaks volumes for the importance of SRT's work
at the cutting edge of some of the most important issues which science is raising for our times. SRT identified four main issues - the basic genetic engineering work at Roslin, whether we should already clone animals, whether we might one day clone humans, and how such research should be controlled and kept accountable to the public.
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The new method should enable Roslin to do a more precise genetic modification using less experimental animals, but the side effect is that the resulting sheep is a clone, genetically almost identical to its founder. PPL might clone 5-10 sheep from a single genetically modified animal, but would then breed naturally thereafter to give flocks of varied sheep, but all containing the desired genetic modification. On this very limited scale, this would not seem ethically unacceptable. The possibility that farm animals might be cloned routinely for meat or milk production on a large scale is however a very different matter. In animal breeding, the need to maintain genetic diversity sets practical limits on how far cloning would make sense, but certain applications are already being considered. A breeder might wish to clone the best breeding stock to sell for feeding up for slaughter, or to found new nucleus herds. Would this be carrying our use of animals one stage too far?
For the Christian, the world around us is God's creation.
Variety is one of its characteristic features, and especially at the level of higher animals and humans. The overall picture in the Bible, in commandments, stories and poetry, is of a creation whose sheer diversity is itself a cause of praise to its creator. To reduce this diversity to a strict blueprint, and produce replica animals routinely on demand, would seem to go against something basic and God-given about the nature of life. The very fact that selective breeding has its limits reflects this fact. Some would argue that cloning is thus absolutely wrong, no matter what it was being used for. SRT argues that scale and intention play a part. PPL's limited context could be acceptable since the main intention was not the clone as such but growing an animal of a known genetic composition, where natural methods would not work. What would be unacceptable would be in routine animal production, where natural methods exist, but would be side-stepped on the grounds of economics or
convenience. This would represent one step too far beyond conventional selective breeding in the way we use animals as commodities. The approach that, whatever use we find for animals, we could clone them to do so more efficiently brings the mass production principles of the factory too far into the animal kingdom. Just as in the Old Testament an ox was not to be muzzled while treading out the grain, animals have certain freedoms which we should preserve. We may use animals to an extent, but we need to remind ourselves that they are firstly God's creatures, to whom we may not do everything we like.
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The Church of Scotland has already stated that to clone human beings would be ethically unacceptable as a matter of principle. On principle, to replicate any human technologically is a violation of the basic dignity and uniqueness of each human being made in God's image, of what God has given to that individual to no one else. It is not the same as twinning. There is a world of difference ethically between choosing to clone from a known existing individual and the unpredictable occurrence of twins of unknown nature in the womb. The nature of cloning is that of an instrumental use of both the clone and the one cloned as means to an end, for someone else's benefit. This represents unacceptable human abuse, and a potential for exploitation which should be outlawed worldwide.
In 1990 UK pioneered legislation making human cloning research illegal, but currently it would allowed the USA and several EU countries, and many other cultures with very different value systems. Some form of international treaty should be called for whereby no country would allow cloning research to be carried over from humans to animals. Realistically, there would be no way to stop a back street clinic or a dictatorship from ignoring such a treaty, but the lines need to be drawn. A second line of defence is also called for - the notion of the ethical scientist, for whom it would be against all professional principles to pursue such research. Some have argued that research should be permitted into the possibility of cloning living transplant organs from body cells. This would require more careful ethical consideration, but the danger of a "slippery slope" to full human cloning would be loom large over such an enterprise.
Dr Donald Bruce
Director, SRT Project
4 April 1997
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