The State of Wisconsin may rejoice in the recent football victory over arch-rival Michigan, but it should cry at the passage of SB 243 by its state senate today. Promoted as "a bill to prohibit human cloning," it goes way beyond banning reproductive cloning, which already is outlawed by Federal law through statutes of the FDA. Therefore, any state law that purports to "bar reproductive cloning" is redundant, at best, and, as is the case in Wisconsin, nothing more than a platform to advocate the banning of all forms of cloning including a procedure known as "therapeutic cloning."
More correctly known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT, it is a key procedure for deriving human embryonic stem cells. The other major source is the use of left-over embryos from fertilization clinics. (There are approximately 400,000 of these period-sized masses which, barred from the womb, are scheduled to be flushed down the drain.) SCNT is neither a technique for creating nor destroying human life. It is a technique used to create an engineered cell mass (technically NOT an embryo, as the true definition of embryo requires the union of an egg joining with a sperm to create an embryo.)
The procedure of SCNT requires the transfer of a normal 46-chromosome nucleus from, say, a person's skin cell, into the cytoplasm of an unfertilized egg cell whose nucleus has been removed, or enucleated. The resultant cell is stimulated, and it begins to develop like an embryo. When it reaches the seven- to ten-day stage (barely visible to the naked eye), its stem cells are harvested and used to derive so-called immortal cells which can differentiate into any of the over 200 cell lines of the human body -- from heart muscle cells to brain cells. These specialized cells can be used to cure, not just treat, but cure, major diseases such as Parkinson's, spinal cord injury, diabetes, heart damage, and much more. As well, SCNT is used to create cell lines to study diseases' pathophysiology and to observe drug effects at a cellular level.
With the passage of this bill, Wisconsin joins the elite club of South Dakota, Indiana, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in banning what is, without question, the greatest potential advance in medical history. With human embryonic stem cells derived by SCNT, blindness may be cured, diabetes may be cured, spinal cord injury may be cured! And these cures are just around the corner. Proof-of-concept studies have already been performed on animal models.
Senator Joe Leibham, while I'm sure your intentions were good, you've done your constituents a great disservice by not only banning, but criminalizing, the chance to cure some of mankind's most horrific ailments. I hope you and your fellow senators, S. Fitzgerald, Lazich, A. Lasee, Reynolds, Kanavas, Kedzie, Roessler, and Grothman are satisfied having played pawns to the misguided and ill-informed right-to-lifers who have led you into believing that a little clump of cells no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence is more of a person than is that thirteen-year-old in the ICU lying there with a crushed spine and less hope, now, for a cure…in your state. By imposing a potential 10-year prison sentence and a $1,000,000 fine against anyone attempting to utilize SCNT to study or to cure humankind's diseases -- even though your bill will be vetoed by your governor -- has sent strong signals to the commercial biotech world to avoid Wisconsin, the very home of stem cell pioneer James Thompson.
Let me make it crystal clear: SCNT does not produce a viable human embryo. The leading stem cell researcher in the world, Dr. Woo Suk Hwang, just this month visited with members of the U.S. Congress to whom he said "the product of SCNT, in humans, cannot possibly produce a viable human, even if it were allowed access to the womb." Ten to fifteen percent of the human genome doesn't get switched on by the surrogate cytoplasm of the unfertilized ovum. Without this full complement of gene expression, the developing cell mass is doomed developmentally. As well there is an architectural flaw in the developing SCNT cell mass (NOT embryo) having to do with centrosomes which would prevent it from developing into a viable human embryo, even if it were allowed into a womb. Which brings us to the third and most compelling reason that, as Louis Guenin, Harvard bioethicist, observes, "an SCNT cell mass would never become a person because, a priori, by design, it is denied the womb."
It's disturbing that a small, theocratic clique is able to control public policy while 78% of the nation endorses human embryonic stem cell research, including practically all the major health care organizations and all our nation's Nobel laureates. Banning SCNT is wrong; criminalizing SCNT is absurd. For a streaming video about SCNT and its place in regenerative medicine, please visit www.txamr.org.