ISSUES RAISED BY HUMAN CLONING RESEARCH HEARING ...

35ucts for applications in oncology, drug discovery and regenerativemedicine.I’m testifying today on behalf of my company and the BiotechnologyIndustry Organization known as BIO. BIO representsmore than 950 biotechnology companies, academic institutions,State biotechnology centers and related organizations in all 50 U.S.states and 33 other nations.Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, thank you forthe opportunity to testify today at this important hearing oncloning. Let me start by making our position perfectly clear. BIOopposes human reproductive cloning. It is simply too dangeroustechnically and raises far too many technical and social questions.That’s why BIO wrote to President Bush last month and urgedhim to extend the voluntary moratorium on human reproductivecloning which was instituted in 1997. I would respectfully ask forthis letter to be included in the hearing record.It would be extremely dangerous to attempt human reproductivecloning. In fact, in most animals reproductive cloning has no betterthan a 3 to 5 percent success rate, that is, very few of the clonedanimal embryos implanted in a surrogate mother animal survive.The others either die in utero, sometimes at very late stages ofpregnancy or die soon thereafter. It is simply unacceptable to subjecthumans to those risks.The Food and Drug Administration has publicly stated that ithas jurisdiction over human reproductive cloning experiments andthat it would not approve them. BIO supports that view.It’s critical, however, to distinguish use of cloning technology tocreate a new human being (reproductive cloning) from other appropriateand important uses of the technology, such as cloning specifichuman cells, genes and other tissues that do not and cannotlead to a cloned human being, so called therapeutic cloning. Thesetechniques are integral to the production of breakthrough medicines,diagnostics and vaccines, to treat heart attacks, various cancers,Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, hepatitis and other diseases.This type of therapeutic cloning could also produce replacementskin, cartilage and bone for burn and accident victims and resultin ways to regenerate retinal and spinal cord tissue.My company, Geron, as well as many other companies and academiclaboratories, use cloning technology for many beneficial purposes.Let me explain how we use it to develop products that couldrevolutionize medicine and improve the lives of people sufferingfrom serious illnesses.Many diseases result in the disruption of cellular function or destructionof tissue. Heart attacks, stroke and diabetes are examplesof common conditions in which critical cells are lost to disease. Today’smedicine is unable to completely restore this loss of function.Regenerative medicine, a new therapeutic paradigm, holds the potentialto cause an individual’s currently malfunctioning cells tobegin to function properly again or even to replace dead or irreparablydamaged cells with fresh, healthy ones, thereby restoringorgan function.At Geron, therapeutic cloning technology is one of the techniqueswe use to create pure populations of functional new cells that canreplace damaged cells in the body. For example, we’re learning howVerDate 11-MAY-2000 07:46 May 24, 2001 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00039 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 71495.TXT HCOM2 PsN: HCOM2