Statement by Senator Dianne Feinstein
- on the need to Ban Human Reproductive Cloning and
Permit Medical Research to Continue -
January 29, 2003

Washington DC - U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif) today provided the following testimony to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space, urging a ban on human reproductive cloning while allowing promising nuclear transplantation research to continue.

The Senator's statement follows:

"Mr. Chairman, we are at the dawn of a new era in medicine: we have mapped the human genome, discovered drug therapies for cancer that work at the cellular level, and are unlocking the promise of nuclear transplantation.

With respect to nuclear transplantation, we are poised between two choices.

Either we can continue under the current status quo with no regulations on cloning and with the certain knowledge that, sooner or later, we will be faced with reproductive cloning.

Or, we can simply and reflexively ban all cloning, including the valuable biomedical research field of nuclear transplantation which may well lead to cures for diseases such as cancer, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's afflicting tens of millions of people.

In my view, both of these choices are morally unacceptable. I believe that we should adopt a balanced approach: ban human reproductive cloning but permit somatic cell nuclear transplantation research to continue, with strong and strict regulatory oversight.

I will shortly be introducing legislation with Senators Hatch, Kennedy, Specter, Harkin, and others to do just that.

Simply put, our legislation seeks a common-sense and balanced approach to this issue: It bans human cloning-that is, creating a whole-body, carbon copy of a human being-but permits valuable stem cell research to continue.

Human reproductive cloning should be prohibited. Such cloning is unsafe, immoral, and unacceptable.

Our bill bans human reproductive cloning. Under our bill, anyone who even attempts to clone a human being will face a 10-year prison term and a minimum $1 million fine.

But there is also wide-scale support in our society to continue research that may yield cures and better treatments and diagnoses for so many illnesses. And our bill allows this important research to continue.

Nuclear transplantation research has nothing to do with cloning humans. Rather, it has everything to do with saving lives and alleviating suffering. Somatic cell nuclear transplantation is a technique that offers enormous potential for providing cures for diseases such as cancer, diabetes, cystic fibrosis, and heart disease as well as conditions such as spinal cord injuries, liver damage, arthritis, and burns.

For example, a blue-ribbon National Academies' Panel concluded that:

"Because of its considerable potential for developing new medical therapies for life-threatening diseases and advancing fundamental knowledge... biomedical research using nuclear transplantation to produce stem cells [should] be permitted."

I believe that any bill to ban cloning should allow this valuable research to continue under strict safeguards to prevent abuse. The legislation that we will introduce will include such safeguards.

I am pleased that virtually every leading medical, scientific, and patients' advocacy group opposes legislation that would ban nuclear transplantation research and supports our approach. These include the American Medical Association, the National Health Council, the Parkinson's Action Network, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, which represents over 600,000 medical researchers around the country.

In my view, it would be a great setback for millions of patients with catastrophic medical conditions to prohibit medical research that offers them the possibility of a cure.

They are the ones whose hopes would be dashed if we ban nuclear transplantation.

I would like to conclude with a letter I received last year from Richard Arvedon:

"'Our five year old daughter suffers from Juvenile diabetes. We were lucky. We discovered her condition during a check-up when she was a year old. When the disease develops in infants, it's usually discovered only when the child lapses into a coma and is rushed to the emergency room, often in critical condition.

Emma's pancreas produces no insulin. On her belt, that she wears twenty-four hours a day, there is an insulin pump that is attached to her backside and that delivers insulin to her body through surgical tubing.

By pricking her finger for blood, as often as every two hours throughout the day and night, we determine her current level of blood sugar and then use the pump to adjust her insulin accordingly.

What we have learned about Emma's particular condition, referred to as 'brittle' or unpredictable diabetes, is that despite all our efforts to control the progressions of the disease and all the efforts she will make as she grows older, Emma can look forward to a lifetime of potential complications, including blindness, kidney failure, limb amputation and a substantially shortened life expectancy, unless a cure if found.

Our family is enormously hopeful, however, that therapeutic cloning research may play a vital role in finding a cure for juvenile diabetes. There already exists empirical evidence that, quite possibly, [somatic cell nuclear transplantation] could yield the insulin producing pancreatic cells that my daughter's body lacks.

If research into this process were to be criminalized, how would I explain to Emma that our government care more about a cloned cell, smaller than a grain of sand, than they do about her.'"

Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to allow me to testify."

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