Cloning: Where Do We Draw the Line?

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German officials were quick to point out that the experiment Hall and Stillman conducted -- cloning a human embryo -- would be considered a federal offense in Germany, punishable by up to five years in prison. "The Americans do not even have our scruples," complained Rudolf Dressler, deputy whip of the Social Democratic opposition in the Bundestag. "They simply go ahead with research, cost what it may." More than 25 countries have commissions that set policy on reproductive technology. In Britain, cloning human cells requires a license the governing body refuses to grant. Violators face up to 10 years in prison. In Japan all research on human cloning is prohibited by guidelines that in the country's highly conformist society have the force of law.

Should the U.S. adopt similar restrictions? That may be difficult at this point. Such research is usually controlled indirectly through the federal purse strings: the government simply cuts off funding to projects Congress finds offensive. But that wouldn't work in this case since there is no federal funding for embryo research; experiments are financed largely by private money, much of it derived from the booming business of in-vitro fertilization.

Making matters even more complicated, there is no federal body charged with setting artificial-fertilization policy in the U.S. The last congressional commission empowered to debate the new technology was disbanded in 1990. Instead, policy is set by a patchwork of state laws, professional societies and local review boards, like the one at George Washington that gave the go- ahead to Hall and Stillman.

Two weeks ago, a report by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment presciently recommended that the government step in. In the past, bioethical policy could have been addressed by any one of a series of federal boards. Perhaps the best was a presidential commission established under President Carter that developed broad policy guidelines on some of the most controversial issues in medicine, such as deciding when brain death has occurred or when it is ethically correct for a doctor to withhold treatment. The commission was disbanded in 1983. Last week's debate made it likely that some kind of national board will be established during President Clinton's watch. It had better be done quickly. Hall told TIME that his technique could produce human clones within "a minimum of a couple of years."

Sensing a shift in the regulatory wind, many reproductive scientists wished aloud that the cloning issue had never been raised -- or at least not in this way. "((Hall and Stillman)) haven't done science or medicine any favors," said Dr. Marilyn Monk, a researcher at London's Institute of Child Health. Dr. Leeanda Wilton, director of embryology at Australia's Monash IVF Center, where much of the in-vitro fertilization technology was developed, said there were hundreds of scientists who could have split an embryo in half, just the way Hall and Stillman did. "They haven't done so because it opens a can of worms," she said.