Clear and Present Danger?
By Caroline Hellman
To clone or not to clone? What's in a clone? A clone by any other name would smell as sweet. Isn't cloning just another form of scientific research? This is a seemingly mundane question, but an important one, as the right to scientific research is supposed to be guaranteed by the first amendment.
Does the Prez know this? Yeah. Apparently, according to a recent New York Times Magazine article, Dr. Leon Kass, the chairman of Bush's Council on Bioethics, the administration is aware of it, but doesn't "want to encourage such thinking."
Similar to arguments and amendments regarding free speech--for example, is it unconstitutional to yell "FIRE! FIRE!" in a crowded subway station, if there is no fire? Only if there is clear and present danger from free speech is speech supposed to be censored or mitigated, and the same is true for scientific experiments. The government is supposed to restrict science only if can prove a threat to public safety or national security--at least that's what it says in the constitution...even if that's not what we abide by with today's government.
This conflict dates back to the late 1970s, at which time a House Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space, asked a group of prestigious legal scholars to testify whether the government had the power to restrict science. All science? Of course not--specifically science pertaining to recombinant DNA, or gene splicing. There was the same fear then that there is now; people would turn to designing their children in attempts to play God, and as a result, generate new and lethal forms of bacteria.
What happened? Well, the debate ended rather abruptly when a National Institutes of Health Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee dictated that science should police itself and not be governed, a la Thoreau, that the government that governs least is best. Now, with regard to G.W. Bush's attempts to limit stem cell research and gene cloning, the debate has re-emerged. Legal scholars argue that to ban stem cell research is to in effect ban science. Moreover, a legal scholar and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, R. Alta Charo, argues, "If the questions you ask and the science you do really challenges or explores cultural or religious or political norms...that in itself is an act of rebellion, and this is exactly the sort of thing that fits comfortably in the spirit of the First Amendment."
Do you agree?
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