Last Sunday's announcement that scientists in Massachusetts had briefly succeeded in cloning human embryos was not exactly a surprise. Such a step had been anticipated in the global scientific community for several years. But it had the effect of a bombshell nonetheless, reigniting at a stroke the ethical and legislative debates over cloning that had been flickering somewhat feebly since Sept. 11 -- and reminding us that the questions raised by this rapidly unfolding technology are still far from being resolved.
It was an incremental step for mankind, really, rather than a giant one, just the next milestone on a road that has been mapped out since Dolly the sheep tottered forth in Scotland back in 1996. The human-cell clusters that were cloned in Massachusetts died after a few hours, not long enough to start producing stem cells and barely long enough, some scientists argue, to be called embryos at all. "These guys didn't get very far," a spokesman for the American Society for Cell Technology confirmed last week.
But any move in the direction of human cloning is enough to worry people, for a variety of reasons. There is certainly room for worry -- about undue haste, about the potential for abuse, about whatever unimagined evils might lie beyond the horizon. But there is another worry, too: that such concerns might impel governments to slam the door shut permanently on technology that also holds the promise of great benefit, both in therapeutic medicine and in the treatment of certain genetic disorders. The argument against haste cuts both ways.