WE KNOW ABOUT FIRE, BUT MURDER IS SPEECH TOO? (via Flag of the World):

Free to Clone (BRIAN ALEXANDER, 9/26/04, NY Times Magazine)

This election year, the debate over cloning technology has become a circus -- and hardly anybody has noticed the gorilla hiding in the tent. Even while President Bush has endorsed throwing scientists in jail to stop ''reckless experiments'' (and has tried to muscle the U.N. into adopting a ban on all forms of cloning, even for research), it's just possible the First Amendment will protect researchers who want to perform cloning research.

Dr. Leon Kass, the chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics and a cloning foe, would like to keep that a secret. ''I don't want to encourage such thinking,'' he said during the council's July 24, 2003, session. But the notion that the First Amendment creates a ''right to research'' has been around for a long time, and Kass knows it.

In 1977, four eminent legal scholars -- Thomas Emerson, Jerome Barron, Walter Berns and Harold P. Green -- were asked to testify before the House Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space. At the time, there was alarm in the country over recombinant DNA, or gene splicing. Some people feared clones, designer babies, a plague of superbacteria. The committee wanted to know if the federal government should, or could, restrict the science.

''Certainly the overwhelming tenor of the testimony was in favor of protecting it,'' Barron, who now teaches at George Washington University, recalls. ''I did say scientific research comes within the umbrella of the First Amendment, and I still feel that way.''

Berns, a conservative political scientist who is now at the American Enterprise Institute, was forced to agree. He didn't like this conclusion, because he feared the consequences of tinkering with nature, but even after consulting with Kass before his testimony, he told Congress that ''the First Amendment protected this kind of research.'' Today, he believes it protects cloning experiments as well.

Research may be protected in some general way by the First Amendment--certainly some aspects would--but the idea that just because you claim that you are engaged in science you have the absolute right to fiddle with the integrity of another person or even kill them is too bizarre to be countenanced. The exact argument that Mr. Alexander is making would protect those who conducted the Tuskeegee experiments and the eugenicists who applied Darwinism on innocent and helpless victims. We've run the experiment of giving science free reign over humans once, with disastrous results. There's no excuse for making the same mistake again.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 27, 2004 8:14 PM