CBS Face the Nation
Aired Sunday 8/19/01

CBS Chief Washington Correspondent Bob Schieff
Correspondent Gloria Borgia
Dr. Panos Zavos
Rep. Dave Welden, Fla
Dr. Lori Andrews, Bioethicist

Schieffer: The subject is human cloning. Could we? Should we? Are we? Joining us to talk about Dr. Panos Zavos. It is my understanding that you plan to implant women with cloned embryos perhaps as early as this fall. Is that correct?

Zavos: That is correct, Bob. The technology as we see it has evolved tremendously. We have developed technology that we think is reliable, and the production -I should emphasize- the production of human cloned embryos can go ahead within the next 60 days and implantation will come later after we verify the quality of these embryos is viable enough to yield a healthy pregnancy.

Schieffer: So how many of these do you plan to do?

Zavos: We have isolated about 200 women that we do have health records on. We are reviewing those. The schedule is to get the first 10 women to participate. We will see whether the pregnancy is taking place.

Schieffer: Do you have any idea what your success rate can be at this point?

Zavos: We view the success rate as being close to what we expect to have for the standard IVF, which is about 30 to 40% right now.

Schieffer: Is there anyone at this point, just let me be frank, is there anyone at this point who can stop you?

Zavos: Not really. I think that the technology exists. We know what we are doing, and this debate about banning it obviously is very healthy, but I think we should come to our senses and realize inevitably this technology will be developed.

Borgia: Rep. Welden, you are the sponsor of the bill that passed the House of Representatives overwhelmingly to ban all cloning. Can he be stopped? Should he be?

Welden: I think he can. The Senate needs to take up the bill. The president has indicated he will sign it. I would like to point out Dr. Zavos is not a physician. He's a Phd.

Zavos: That is correct.

Welden: What he is talking about doing in my opinion is gross medical malpractice and negligent. It is totally unethical. If he did have a medical license, officials in Kentucky would be trying to suspend it for him to be talking about doing this.

Zavos: I'm not practicing, or doing this in Kentucky, in the USA, therefore we need to understand that banning it in America is not banning it for the world. It is very important for people in America to understand if it does not happen here it will happen somewhere else.

Welden: I have been in contact with European officials. They want to proceed with a global ban. They have asked the UN to take this up in the General Assembly. A lot of people in the world look to the US for leadership on an issue like this. We are the leader of medical technology around the globe. So it is important that the US act and speak. I think the rest of the world will follow suit. And it will be impossible for him to do what he is trying to do.

Schieffer: Well Congressman let me ask you this. You just heard Dr. Zavos say that he thinks he going to have a pretty good success rate. Is there evidence to back this up?

Welden: That's totally absurd. It took over 260 tries to produce Dolly...

Zavos: 277 Congressman

Welden: and with many of them resulting in malformed or defective babies or sheep being born. So for him to say he is just going to go ahead to proceed doing this is to me totally absurd.

I would like to point out one other thing. All of the offspring from cloning procedures-- they have cloned 5 different mammals so far-- they are very, very big. The placenta is big. The umbilical cord is big. This is a health hazard to the women involved.

Borgia: Let's ask Dr. Andrews what the medical community believes about cloning. Have we just let the genie out of the bottle now and there is no way to put it back in?

Andrews: Most of the medical organizations have come out against human cloning. One third of animal offspring die shortly before or shortly after. Even those that appear normal when they are born sometimes die later of health problems, heart problems, lung problems, immune problems.

Now there was study at Duke this week that suggested that humans have an extra gene which might prevent the very large births but that would not deal with these other problems. If we had an infectious disease that was killing one third of babies we would declare it a public health hazard. We would not go ahead and open a clinic to do it. And in fact the United States is a rogue nation in this area. At least 42 other countries have banned cloning already.

Schieffer: Dr Zavos, are you going against the scientific community here?

Zavos: No. First of all I need to correct the record here. Most of you have missed the National Academy of Science's presentation last week where three or four scientists were paraded in front of the National Academy of Science. They have revealed success in pigs, goats, other species up to 70, 80 or 100% and so when you go back to Dolly five years ago you are going back to the Smithsonian Institute. 277 eggs were tried, 29 embryos produced, Congressman 20 embryos. 13 ewes were the recipients, and 1 health Dolly was produced. And no malformed babies were produced from that effort.

The record needs to be kept straight here in order not to misrepresent, or present the wrong information to the American people.

Andrews: I was looking at data from a week ago that suggests that they are looking overall at worldwide studies in cattle, mice and so forth. The malformation rate is about 1/3 overall. That's one week old data, aggregate for the world.

Zavos: You must understand though that there are an awful lot of incompetent scientists that are getting into this to become famous, to make a fortune and that is not the issue here. We need to look at reputable scientists, with reputable track records that we can rely upon. We can't rely on every Tom, Dick or Harry out there that generates information that is obviously misleading. And therefore, it is it is very important that we understand that this technology evolves everyday and we as humans have been doing IVF for 23 years. We need to understand that we have a great deal more experience than any of those animal cloners all put together.

Welden: If you actually talk to the scientists who produced Dolly they will tell you that there were sheep that were born that had serious problems that did not survive.

Zavos: I debated those people in England.

Welden: They are the ones, the are the loudest and most outspoken ones who say this should not be tried with humans and they are the ones that say this would be malpractice. It would be unethical to proceed with humans.

Schieffer: Some people say Dr. Zavos that by pushing cloning to this point as you and some others have done, it is kind of tangling the issue of what we ought to do about stem cell research. Should these two things be separated, Dr. Andrews?

Andrews: I think they should. They offer different possibilities but I think both of them have something in common and that is we are going to be the generation that decides the major bioethic issues for the next century. And whether we should live among cloned human peoples, watch sports played by genetically enhanced athletes, use embryos as the source of treatment. And if you look at what happened when Congressman Welden introduced this bill, members of the House of Representatives said they were humbled. They were least prepared for that than any other issue and I think that it would be good to make a move past what Congressman Welden has done and take the embryo stem cell issue, the cloned embryos for therapeutic purposes out of the bill that bans human cloning. They are two different issues.

Borgia: Well, Congressman let's talk about that because you ban all cloning. There is something that Dr. Andrews calls therapeutic cloining which is different from cloning human beings in which cells are created particularly for tissue repair.

Welden: Therapeutic cloning is a theoretical construct. It does not exist. You cannot even produce an animal model where it is possible to do therapeutic cloning to treat disease so you are saying we need to pull this out because we have this treatment available. There is no treatment available. The other thing that is very important is if you are going to allow embryos to be created in the lab in large quantities for so called therapeutic cloning it is inevitable that somebody like Zavos gets a hold of some embryos and implants them in a woman and so there are a lot of people, myself included, who feel the best way to prevent reproductive cloning is to stop it at the beginning. I also have some very serious moral and ethical issues when you start talking about creating embryos for destructive research purposes. You are going to be saying we are creating lives but we are not going to be allowing those human lives to proceed on to human development. We're going to extract what we need from them and then we're going to destroy them . I think there are many other promising arenas of research including using adult stem cells that will prove to be much more effective in terms of overcoming the immune rejection issues that people try to use to justify so called therapeutic cloning.

Schieffer: Let me just go back to Dr. Zavos for one final question because I think, Doctor, that the thing that concerns most people is what happens if you do have accidents? If you do create monsters? Who decides what to do with that? Who decides, you known, what to do if you create a child with three legs or something?

Zavos: Bob, there is an issue here, obviously and we're talking about fiction. And that is what people are afraid of. And the British Medical Association came out to make a statement saying people are opposed to reproductive cloning because of fear, and that is what we are really talking about. This monsterous thing that the fiction books and Hollywood has created. The moral of the story is that reproductive cloning can be made to be safe like IVF was, that was banned originally in the US 23 years ago. And now IVG is as common as sliced bread, or synonymous with that. Therefore, all I can say to you is reproductive cloning is going to be developed eventually, either by us or by someone else. It is going to be made safe and those kinds of issues that you are referring to are medical issues that needs to be decided between the doctor who treats the patient and the patient themselves.

Schieffer: OK, doctors. Thanks to all of you. I think I learned something this morning and I hope our viewers did also.