ISSUES RAISED BY HUMAN CLONING RESEARCH HEARING ...

ISSUES RAISED BY HUMAN CLONINGRESEARCHWEDNESDAY, MARCH 28, 2001HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE,SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS,Washington, DC.The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in room2123, Rayburn House Office Building, James C. Greenwood (chairman)presiding.Members present: Representatives Greenwood, Stearns, Largent,Burr, Whitfield, Bass, Tauzin (ex officio), Deutsch, Strickland,DeGette, John, and Rush.Staff present: Alan Slobodin, majority counsel; Julie Corcoran,majority counsel; Ray Shepherd, majority counsel; Robert Simison,professional staff member; Chris Knaur, minority investigator; andJohn Ford, minority counsel.Mr. GREENWOOD. All right, the hearing before the Oversight andInvestigations Subcommittee will now come to order. We thank thewitnesses for their indulgence and the Chair recognizes himself for5 minutes for the purposes of an opening statement.Nearly 80 years ago, Aldous Huxley wrote his literary masterpieceBrave New World. In that book he posited a future where geneticengineering is commonplace and human beings, aided bycloning, are mass produced. Controllers and predestinators replacedmothers and fathers. The words themselves consideredsmut.As the new authors of human life in an uncompromising searchfor human happiness and stability, the possibility of human individualityhad been entirely jettisoned. For most of its 80 years,Brave New World could be seen as a disturbing work of science fiction.That is no longer the case. The possible cloning of humanbeings is now relegated to the world—not relegated to the world offiction. The question we must now ask is this: what should we dowith this science? That is what brings us here today.Several scientists claim that they are poised to take the fatefulnext step and actually produce a human clone. We in this subcommitteewill focus not only on the scientific, but on the moraland ethical questions raised by the astonishing possibility that anexact copy of a human being might be cloned in the near future.What then is cloning? The World Book Encyclopedia describescloning as a process that involves ‘‘destroying the nucleus of an eggcell of the species to be cloned. The nucleus is then removed froma body cell of an animal of the same species. This donor nucleus(1)VerDate 11-MAY-2000 07:46 May 24, 2001 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00005 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 71495.TXT HCOM2 PsN: HCOM2