December 12, 2001, Boston MA

Good afternoon. My name is Father Tad Pacholczyk. I did my doctoral work in neuroscience at Yale University, where I focused on cloning genes which are expressed in the human brain. I also worked for several years as a molecular biologist here at Mass. General Hospital, before going to Rome to do advanced work in theology and in bioethics.

I’m convinced you really don’t have to be a rocket scientist in order to appreciate that embryonic human life is inviolable and deserving of unconditional respect. The argument hinges on a simple biological affirmation, namely, that a human embryo is a human being. It is a human being because it is a being that is human, not a being that is zebra or a being that is cat or a being that is any other animal. And of course if you are a human being, you have human rights. Those human rights accrue to you because you, by nature, belong to the community of men, and all of us came into the world via that same embryonic trajectory. As a former embryo myself, I recognize how it’s incumbent upon me to speak for and protect those who happen to still be in those very early embryonic stages.

That’s why I would like to spend a moment looking at the distinction between therapeutic and reproductive cloning, because that distinction, which is at the heart of our debate today, is widely misunderstood and misconstrued. In actuality, there’s no difference between reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning. There’s only cloning, and the distinction comes later when you ask what will be done with the cloned human being after it’s manufactured. Will you implant it into a uterus, or will you contravene it to gain access to its harvestable cells and tissues? These considerations begin to reveal the inconsistency of preparing legislation which would penalize the one form of cloning without penalizing the other.

Now it’s probably safe to say that most people are opposed to making cloned infants. Some of these same people, though, don’t object to cloning in order to harvest tissues. They would see therapeutic cloning as morally problematic only because it might push us further along that dark path to making infants who are clones. But if we think that way, we are missing something very, very important here. The real issue is not where therapeutic cloning may take us in the future, but what it does when we carry it out today. Permit me to speak very directly with you since the time is short: therapeutic cloning is not wrong because it might lead to cloned infants one day; it is wrong because of what it is in itself. As surprising as it may sound, therapeutic cloning, from the moral-ethical point of view, is actually a greater evil than reproductive cloning.