**Testimony of Representative Patrick J. Toomey**

Before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and
Transportation Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space

January 29, 2003

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee for allowing me the
opportunity to testify today.

As you know, during the last Congress, the House of Representatives
overwhelmingly passed H.R. 2505, a bill introduced by the gentleman from
Florida, Dr. Weldon, which would ban all human cloning. As a strong
supporter and one of the 265 House members who voted for it, I am here
today to urge my Senate colleagues to do likewise. As the President
stated last night, "because no human life should be started or ended as
the object of an experiment, I ask you to set a high standard for
humanity, and pass a law against all human cloning."

I am certainly very sympathetic to all those who suffer from incurable
or chronic afflictions-we all are-and we all are committed to helping to
find cures. I understand the good intentions of those who advocate human
cloning in the hope that research on these clones might yield cures for
major illnesses. But for a variety of reasons, both technical and
ethical, I believe it is wrong to pursue this approach.

On the technical level, although I am neither a doctor nor a scientist,
the evidence suggests to me that cloned human embryos are not likely to
yield cures for major illnesses. Hopes to the contrary are not well
founded, and may be false hopes for the afflicted.

According to Thomas Okarma, Chief Executive Officer of Geron
Corporation, "The odds favoring success are vanishingly small, and the
costs are daunting. It would take thousands of \[human\] eggs on an
assembly line to produce a custom therapy for a single person. The
process is a nonstarter, commercially."

Furthermore, despite years of research with animal cloning, no
successful treatment has been developed using cells derived from cloned
embryos for either animals or people.

The process that would be required to produce large supplies of cloned
human embryos is itself ethically problematic. Superovulatory drugs are
necessary for producing large supplies of eggs for harvesting. These
drugs have been linked to an increased risk of ovarian cancer. In
addition, this process inherently treats a woman's eggs as a commodity.

Supporters of human cloning for research purposes have proposed
limitations that are both arbitrary and unworkable. To avoid the dilemma
of creating a cloned child they would require the cloned embryo to be
destroyed after a specified period of time - some have suggested 14
days. Clearly this is an arbitrary point in time. If scientists were to
determine that the embryo would be more scientifically valuable after 21
days or 51 days, what rationale would keep the 14-day limit in force?

In addition, a specified deadline for experimenting upon and destroying
a cloned human embryo would be almost impossible to enforce. A Justice
Department statement concluded that "enforcing a modified cloning ban
would be problematic and pose certain law enforcement challenges that
would be lessened with an outright ban on human cloning." The same
statement went on to say, "there does not seem to be any reliable means
for determining the difference between a fertilized embryo and a cloned
embryo" and concluded by stating "once a pregnancy were established, any
government-directed attempt to terminate a cloned embryo in utero would
create problems enormous and complex." In other words, if a cloned human
embryo were to be implanted and a viable pregnancy established it would
be virtually impossible to detect or differentiate from a routine
pregnancy. And if detected, the only way to prevent a cloned child is a
forced abortion, which is obviously unacceptable to all of us.

As daunting as all of the technical challenges are, perhaps the
strongest arguments against human cloning are the ethical arguments. The
process of transferring a somatic cell nucleus into an enucleated egg
produces a human embryo that has the potential to be implanted in utero
and developed to term. In other words, the embryo produced for the
purpose of "therapeutic cloning" as some call it, is biologically
indistinguishable from an embryo intended for reproduction. It is a
human life-at a very early stage of development of course-but entirely
human nevertheless. Thus creating cloned human embryos for research
purposes means creating human life for the purpose of research with the
intent of destroying it. This commodification and exploitation strikes
me as a profound undermining of our society's sense of human dignity.
And in doing so, it undermines our very humanity.

Mr. Chairman, I thank you for holding this hearing today, I thank you
for your support for a ban on all human cloning and I thank you for
allowing me to testify this afternoon.