Slow down the human race

The ethical considerations of human cloning are daunting -- or at least they should be. They should not be lost in a race to see who can be first to clone a human baby.
Advocates of human cloning who met Friday in Rome were in no mood to listen to naysayers or critics.
Full speed ahead: "The genie is out of the bottle," declared Panos Zavos, a reproduction researcher who left the University of Kentucky to pursue creation of a human clone. Human cloning is prohibited in the United States. But while Zavos used an allusion to "The Arabian Nights" to soft-pedal the inevitability of cloning, the real story could be more like something from a Stephen King novel.
A number of American scientists have spoken out against premature efforts to clone a human being.
"Dolly is here, and we are next," said Zavos, a reference to Dolly, the cloned sheep.
Dissenting voice: Rudolf Jaenisch, a pioneer in cloning at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., says: "Serious problems have happened in all five species cloned so far, and all are mammals, so of course it's going to happen in humans. No question."
A Washington Post story reported that, based on cloning experiments with animals, almost all of the first 100 pregnancies would end in spontaneous abortion because of genetic or physical abnormalities. Those pregnancies that went to term would be marked by grossly enlarged placentas and fatty livers.
The three or four fetuses that survived to term would be huge by normal standards -- perhaps 15 pounds -- and likely to die in the first week or two from heart and blood vessel problems, underdeveloped lungs, diabetes or immune system deficiencies.
Against that sobering backdrop, one of Zavos' colleagues, Severino Antinori, boasted in January that a human would be cloned within a year.
Zavos said that the original 10 infertile couples who expressed an interest in being part of the human project have been joined by hundreds more since word got out.
Driving forces: One has to wonder if those couples truly understand the implications of human cloning experimentation at this time. And if they do understand, and if the urge to have something that is "theirs" is so great as to outweigh the inherent dangers, what does that say about them?
Human cloning is, perhaps, inevitable. But when the day to clone arrives, it should be after years and years of additional research designed to minimize the possible abnormalities, both for the pregnant woman and the child she bears.
This is not a race to be won or lost, and those who treat it as such will almost certainly lose. And the rest of the human race will lose something as well.