DATE: Thursday, June 5, 1997                TAG: 9706050477

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY PAUL RECER, ASSOCIATED PRESS 

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:  102 lines

COMMITTEE MAY ENDORSE LIMITED CLONING RESEARCH BUT ANTI-ABORTION GROUPS ARE AGAINST THE FEDERAL ADVISORY PANEL'S PROPOSAL.

A proposal to allow lab experiments on human cloning but forbid the actual replication of a person drew immediate outcries Wednesday from anti-abortion groups that say human cloning would permit ``grave evils.''

However, the partial-cloning recommendation from a federal advisory panel brought praise from biotechnology groups that say it would allow valuable research while essentially calling a timeout on efforts to make cloned humans.

In Norfolk, the chairman of the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine said the panel's decision was appropriate - forbidding the making of babies from cloned embryos, without restricting potentially beneficial research involving similar technologies.

The panel, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, will meet Saturday to draw up final recommendations for President Clinton on the stance the federal government should take on human cloning.

Despite a basic consensus, members still disagree on many details of their recommendations, said one member of the advisory group, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He said those differences may not be resolved until Saturday.

At the White House, the Clinton administration declined comment until the commission issues its final report. ``Let's wait and see what actually comes to the White House,'' said spokesman Mike McCurry.

Cloning became an issue of government concern after a Scottish scientist cloned a sheep, named Dolly, from cells taken from adult sheep. The experiment was the first to successfully clone a genetic duplicate individual from an adult mammal. The effort's success prompted a call for legislation to forbid human cloning.

Clinton asked Congress to wait on considering cloning laws until the group of scientists and ethicists could study the issue.

Although final points remain unresolved, a consensus of the 18-member group will call for laws to forbid human replication through cloning, but not to address experimentation with cloned human cells that go no further than a laboratory dish, said the panel member.

Under the plan, privately funded scientists could clone human embryos for research but not to make babies, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

``They came up with a good answer,'' said Dr. William E. Gibbons, chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Norfolk's Eastern Virginia Medical School.

The department, which incorporates the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine, has no plans to clone embryos, even for research, Gibbons said.

But some technologies similar to the one that led to the cloning of Dolly might be used in other, beneficial ways here and elsewhere, he said.

For example, researchers might improve the quality of an egg in an older woman, enabling her to have a healthy baby. Or they might develop therapies to treat diseases such as cancer.

The panel member said there is fundamental agreement on these points:

Human cloning that leads to the birth of a child should be strictly forbidden in all U.S. labs, both private and public.

Human embryo research, including cloning research, that stops short of producing a child should not be addressed by federal law. But the moratorium on federal money for such embryo research would continue.

The group's position means that research could continue on the ``Dolly technique,'' the panel member said - research in which a human embryo is made from the nucleus of a mature cell joined in a lab dish with a human egg without its nucleus. However, such embryos could not be placed into a woman's womb for development into a baby.

Such a recommendation by the commission permits ``two separate grave evils,'' said John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe, director of the American Bioethics Advisory Commission, a part of the American Life League Inc. anti-abortion group.

The first, he said, was the creation in a lab of a cloned human embryo; the second was to prohibit implantation and development of the embryo, which eventually would be killed.

``This means it is OK to clone as long as you kill,'' Cavanaugh-O'Keefe said. His group considers any human embryo to be a human, he said.

But Carl Feldbaum, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, which includes 700 companies, applauded the proposed recommendation.

``What we had hoped is that the commission will draw a bright line distinguishing between whole human research and research which uses only tissue that has been cloned,'' he said.

Such research could help science learn how to make ``spare parts,'' tissue that could replace diseased organs or burned skin.

Feldbaum said his industry is opposed to cloning whole humans because ``the technique is imperfectly understood. There are also ethical and moral questions. We are not intellectually or emotionally prepared.''

A commission member said the group probably will recommend any law restricting human cloning include a ``sunset clause'' causing the law to expire at some point.

That would force Congress to re-evaluate the issue if scientific advances make cloning ``not as fraught with risks as in the Dolly technique.''

Although Dolly was successfully cloned, Scottish researchers reported more than 100 failures, some of which involved monstrous birth defects in lambs that quickly died. Such a result would not be tolerated in humans.

If science finds a way to correct safety issues, said the commissioner, then society will need to consider human cloning again. The government then would have to determine what level of safety should be required for human cloning to be considered and address, once more, the basic issue of whether it should be permitted, he said. The commission, he added, is nowhere near resolving those issues. MEMO: Virginian-Pilot staff writer Pat Dooley contributed to this

report. KEYWORDS: CLONING

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