TESTIMONY OF DR. MICHELINE ROTH  TO THE SENATE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

December 12, 2001

I am Dr. Micheline Mathews-Roth, a physician doing research on a rare genetic disease. I want to stress that I am here as an individual citizen, and not as a representative of either the Harvard Medical School or the Brigham & Women’s Hospital, with which I am affiliated.

I am here to urge the legislature to pass laws which clearly ban both so-called human therapeutic cloning as well as human reproductive cloning. There seems to be agreement that human reproductive cloning should be banned, so I won’t discuss it further. I urge the ban on therapeutic cloning, because, in therapeutic cloning, it is necessary to kill a growing human being of 4 to 7 days of age to obtain the stem cells which will be used to make the cells and organs needed for the treatment of various diseases.

Here are the scientific facts to back up my statement. In the embryology textbook, "The Developing Human, Clinically Oriented Embryology" by Moore and Persaud, the authors state on page 2: "Zygote: this cell results from the union of an oocyte and a sperm. A zygote is the beginning of a new human being (i.e. an embryo)." This is a well-established scientific fact. In normal development, either in the mother’s body, or in a petri dish in the process of "in vitro fertilization", the zygote divides to form multiple cells, and by the 4th to 5th day of the new human being’s life it has formed a blastocyst, a sphere which consists of an outer layer of cells called the trophoblast and inside the trophoblast, a mass or clump of cells. These inner mass cells are the embryonic stem cells. It is important to realize that in both reproductive and therapeutic cloning of humans, the embryo develops into a blastocyst in the same way as in normal development - see the attached illustration. In normal reproduction, the zygote gets the complete set of chromosomes needed to be a member of its species by the union of chromosomes from the egg and sperm; in cloning, the zygote, the first cell of the new cloned human, gets its complete needed set of chromosomes from the somatic (or body) cell of the donor, usually the patient to be treated. It is also important to remember that the blastocyst made for therapeutic cloning is a member of the human species, and if implanted in a uterus, is capable of continuing growth to form an older embryo, fetus and eventually newborn, just as would a blastocyst made for reproductive cloning. The zygote, the first cell, of a cloned human or animal is biologically an identical twin of the nucleus donor - in fact, one way (during normal development) that identical twins develop is by the separation of one of the first 2 to 4 cells (called blastomeres) formed when the zygote starts to divide - that separated cell becomes the zygote, the first cell, of the twin. The 1 to 5 day old embryo of a human or animal to be used in therapeutic cloning is definitely NOT "an entirely new kind of biological organism never before seen in Nature", as the Chair of the ethics advisory board of Advanced Cell Technology stated in testimony before Congress - it is nothing but a very young identical twin of the human or animal whose nucleus was used to form it. If cloned embryos were an "entirely new biological organism", one could never produce normal animals by reproductive cloning, as Advanced Cell Technology itself has shown. There is NO difference between the blastocysts produced by normal reproduction, IVF, reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning - all are capable of producing offspring belonging to the species of the donor(s) of their genetic material, and if any of these blastocysts are destroyed, a new, unique individual of their respective species is killed. Yes, even identical twins are unique individuals!

The crucial difference between therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning of any species is not one of production technique, but is the fact that in therapeutic cloning, the growing human or animal blastocyst is killed by opening it up and collecting its inner mass, or stem cells -just as in the process of harvesting stem cells from left-over in vitro fertilization embryos: in both cases, this results in the death of a 4 to 5-day old human. This very young human being is notjust a clump of cells, as proponents of therapeutic cloning are trying to make you believe, but a real member of our species - that a large number of very young embryos usually die and never get to implant, or might go on to form twins, or at that age have no distinct organs, are not reasons to deliberately kill them, even for the good reason of potentially helping other sick humans, especially when there may exist other ways of helping them. These embryos are definitely members of the human species - they are not pre-human or animals! In ethics, a good end never justifies evil means to obtain it. To condone the deliberate killing of very young human beings is clearly a blatant act of age discrimination.

Thus, I urge the Committee to:

1. Approve a bill worded in an unambiguous way which would ban both therapeutic and reproductive cloning, but which would allow individual genes or other other small segments of DNA to be given to human beings at any stage of their development, for gene therapy treatments (which only require relatively small amounts of DNA to be given to patients).

2. Encourage biotechnology companies to develop methods of "direct cell programming", as Advanced Cell Technology wants to do, but not allow the killing of cloned human embryos in the process of developing this technique. To develop these methods, there is no need to use human cloned embryos or stem cells - the development work can be done using animal, particularly primate, egg cells, cloned embryos and stem cells. Once the methods of direct cell programming have been developed using the primate system, then apply them to human somatic cells. This way, no very young humans are killed, and primate endangered species and ill animals, as well as humans, may be helped.