Posted on August 7, 2001 at 9:03 a.m.

STORY:

The issue of human cloning is in the news again with today's announcement by a controversial Italian doctor, Severino Antinori, that he will continue with his plans to clone human beings. Gregory Pence, Ph.D., a bioethicist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) says that while philosophically he favors human cloning: “We have to make sure it’s safe before going ahead with it.”

WHO:

Gregory Pence, Ph.D., is a bioethicist in the UAB Department of Philosophy and the UAB School of Medicine. He wrote the 1997 book Who's Afraid of Human Cloning? (Rowman & Littlefield). His other books include Re-Creating Medicine: Ethical Issues at the Frontiers of Medicine (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) and Classic Cases in Medical Ethics: Accounts of the Cases that Shaped Medical Ethics (McGraw-Hill, 3rd edition 2000).

WHAT:

Pence argues that, too often, science fiction movies have conditioned the public to fear cloning, genetic screening, egg donation, surrogate motherhood and other new medical technologies. He has also said “the techniques of originating a child by cloning are not that different from what is permitted in assisted reproduction and that the motives of parents to pursue cloning are not that different from the normal motives that parents have in creating children.”

But, Pence cautions that the first child created by human cloning must be normal, the way Louise Brown was from in vitro fertilization. “That is why we need to study cloned human embryos and cloned primates before bringing a human child to term from a cloned embryo.” Despite the dangers of going ahead at this time, Pence said he does not think cloning should be made a federal crime. “The present situation is like the first heart transplants, which were very dangerous before cyclosporin. Nevertheless, we didn't make heart transplantation a federal crime and as a result, medicine eventually made it safe and beneficial.”

CALL:

Gail Short, UAB Media Relations, (205) 934-8931, or gshort@uab.edu. In the evenings or weekends, call (205) 934-3411 and ask for the Media Relations person on call.