Ethics Speaker Condemns Human Cloning

Ethics Speaker Condemns Human Cloning

BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY
Rice News Staff
April 29, 1999

Like the biblical Jeremiah who sees humanity stepping toward a path to destruction,
Leon Kass, a leading expert in medical ethics, cried out against the "evil
of human cloning."

"Cloning of man will dehumanize him," said Kass, the Addie Clark
Harding Professor in the College and the Committee on Social Thought at the
University of Chicago. He delivered a lecture at Rice, titled "Procreation
or Manufacture? What’s Wrong with Human Cloning," on April 15 in Duncan
Hall. His talk was the final event in the 1998-99 Rice University Lecture Series
on Ethics, Politics and Society.

Humanity is on a biomedical threshold, Kass said, who then offered a particularly
sinister peek into the future.

Read Aldous Huxley’s novel "Brave New World," Kass urged his audience.
"Brave New World" (1932) is a bleak and sinister look at a world that
is essentially an engineered paradise, where humans are cloned. "Fertilization
in the lab is the gateway to the brave new world," he said.

Kass is no stranger to bioengineering and biotechnology. He earned his medical
degree at the University of Chicago and a doctorate in biochemistry at Harvard
University, where he worked in biochemistry in the laboratory of Nobel Prize
winner Konrad Bloch, who shared the award for discovering how cells produce
cholesterol.

After Kass produced eight scientific publications in three years, he turned
his attention to issues of biomedical ethics and the human condition.

He has written on fundamental social issues including cloning, infanticide
and in vitro fertilization. He also tackled more general topics such as birth,
death, the meaning of life, courtship, marriage, fatherhood, motherhood, piety,
the Bible and the human significance of dietary restrictions.

He has published numerous scientific articles and many articles on ethical
issues in publications such as Science, New Republic, the Public Interest, Commentary
and others. He has written two books: "The Hungry Soul: Eating and the
Perfecting of Our Nature," (the Free Press, 1994) and "Toward a More
Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs," (the Free Press, 1985).

Kass warned that new reproductive technologies are undermining the stable family.
Cloning is particularly troublesome to Kass because the technology allows "parents"
to control the outcome of the child.

Just because a cloned child has the same genotype as a famous athlete, a beautiful
movie star or a mathematical genius, does not mean the child’s destiny is predetermined.
But parents of cloned children will have expectations for their child’s future.

"Cloning," Kass said, "is inherently despotic."

The supporters of fertilization technology may see cloning as a neutral extension
of what is now happening in labs. Women may see cloning as liberation from the
need for females to rely upon males to reproduce. But, Kass said, most humans
have a sense of intuition that cloning is repugnant or that it might be "a
radical form of child abuse."

Kass concluded his lecture with the warning that, "We should prevent the
cloning of humans."