[extropy-chat] Free to clone

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

>From the New York Times, by Brian Alexander: This election year, the
debate over cloning technology has become a circus - and hardly
anybody has noticed the gorilla hiding in the tent. Even while
President Bush has endorsed throwing scientists in jail to stop
"reckless experiments" (and has tried to muscle the U.N. into adopting
a ban on all forms of cloning, even for research), it's just possible
the First Amendment will protect researchers who want to perform
cloning research.
Dr. Leon Kass, the chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics
and a cloning foe, would like to keep that a secret. "I don't want to
encourage such thinking," he said during the council's July 24, 2003,
session. But the notion that the First Amendment creates a "right to
research" has been around for a long time, and Kass knows it.

In 1977, four eminent legal scholars—Thomas Emerson, Jerome Barron,
Walter Berns and Harold P. Green—were asked to testify before the
House Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space. At the time,
there was alarm in the country over recombinant DNA, or gene splicing.
Some people feared clones, designer babies, a plague of superbacteria.
The committee wanted to know if the federal government should, or
could, restrict the science.
''Certainly the overwhelming tenor of the testimony was in favor of
protecting it,'' Barron, who now teaches at George Washington
University, recalls. ''I did say scientific research comes within the
umbrella of the First Amendment, and I still feel that way.''
Why legal scholars would defend the right to research is hardly
mysterious. The founding fathers passionately defended scientific and
academic freedom, and the Supreme Court has traditionally had a high
regard for it. In Griswold v. Connecticut, for example, the decision
that struck down state prohibitions on the sale of contraceptives, the
court stated that the First Amendment protected ''freedom of
inquiry.''
Neoconservatives like Kass and the bioethics council members Charles
Krauthammer and Francis Fukuyama have emphasized the need to maintain
a fixed conception of human nature. But the O.T.A. directly addressed
this in a 1981 report. ''Even if the rationale . . . were expanded to
include situations where knowledge threatens fundamental cultural
values about the nature of man, control of research for such a reason
probably would not be constitutionally permissible.''