Nascent Embryo Laws

Do the realities of international competition mean that the United States or any other country will fatalistically jump into a technological arms race? In fact, many have not. Legislatures and administrative agencies around the world have been racing to fill the gaping holes in the existing regime for regulating human biomedicine. One of the first and most contentious policy issues they have grappled with concerns the uses that may be made of human embryos, and the result has been a wide variety of national-level rules.

As of November 2001, 16 countries had passed laws on human embryo research, including France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Norway, Ireland, Poland, Brazil, and Peru. In addition, Hungary, Costa Rica, and Ecuador implicitly restrict research by conferring on embryos a right to life. Finland, Sweden, and Spain permit embryo research but only on extra embryos left over from in vitro fertilization clinics. Germany’s laws are among the most restrictive. Since passage of its 1990 Act for the Protection of Embryos, several areas have been regulated, including abuse of human embryos, sex selection, artificial modification of human germ-line cells, cloning, and the creation of hybrid organisms, or chimeras, that possess genes from both human and other species. Britain in 1990 passed the Fertilisation and Embryology Act, which established one of the most clear-cut legal frameworks in the world for the regulation of embryo research and cloning. This act was thought to ban reproductive cloning while permitting research cloning, though in 2001 a British court ruled that reproductive cloning would actually be permitted under it. In September 2001, the European Parliament passed a resolution calling for bans on both reproductive and therapeutic cloning and calling for Britain to reconsider its 1990 law.

Embryo research is only the beginning. Other developments that will come up sooner or later include preimplantation diagnosis, which permits screening for birth defects but also could allow for other characteristics such as intelligence and sex; germ-line engineering, which expands the potential of genetic manipulation to include nonhuman traits; new psychotropic drugs that could improve memory or other cognitive skills; and the creation of chimeras. Geoffrey Bourne, former director of the Emory University primate center, once stated that "it would be very important scientifically to try to produce an ape-human cross." Other researchers have suggested using women as "hosts” for the embryos of chimpanzees or gorillas. One biotech company, Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology, reported that it had successfully transferred human DNA into a cow’s egg and gotten it to grow into a blastocyst before it was destroyed. Scientists have been deterred from doing research in this area for fear of bad publicity, but in the United States such work is not illegal.