Five years after Dolly the sheep made her debut in Scotland, a Massachusetts biotech firm announced in November that it had cloned human embryos. Well, sort of. It turned out the handful of cells died within hours and were never viable sources of embryonic stem cells—the versatile and controversial cells that can produce any kind of human tissue and, researchers believe, could someday be used to manufacture replacement organs and cure genetic diseases. But the headlines set off a political firestorm, and, at Stanford’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, the phone of senior research scholar Mildred Cho, PhD ’92, has been ringing ever since.
Stanford: Did the news from Advanced Cell Technology catch the bioethics community by surprise?
One of the biggest issues surrounding the firm’s announcement is the fact that there’s no regulatory mechanism to deal with a U.S. company doing cloning. I think there’s the potential for us to not know what’s going on in a lot of private companies because they’re able to keep trade secrets and so can control the flow of information.
Scientists largely agree that embryonic stem cells are needed for research, yet the House of Representatives passed a bill last summer that would ban cloning—for both reproduction and research. What does that say to you?
What’s disturbing is that the stem-cell question is ultimately [treated as] a political question, and that actions will always be based more on politics than ethics. The political framework will be a discussion about the right to life on one side, and about the rights of industry to conduct research on the other.
You’re often asked to review draft legislation on the state and national levels. What do you bring to the table?
A lot of policy-makers are necessarily focused on short-term implications, and what we at the center can add is some sense of the long-term implications or potential social changes. For example, how do you think about people as humans if you allow them to be created in order to create organs for other people?
The biotech industry has come of age only in the last 20 years, right?
The interface with industry is a relatively new phenomenon for medicine and biology, and I’m interested in the question of whether biotech, pharmaceutical or health-related companies have different moral obligations than other parts of the private sector. And if you’re working at an academic institution and are also the founder of a company, the lines definitely get blurred.
How do you plan to stay ahead of future surprises?
By trying to anticipate more and be more proactive. The great thing about being on a campus like Stanford is that we can have close ties with people in engineering and biology and the social sciences. We can learn what they’re thinking about, not just what they’ve already done.
