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January 17, 2003/Shevat 14 5763, Vol. 55, No. 21
Cloning not kosher
JOE BERKOFSKY
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - When it comes to cloning, Jews across the religious spectrum agree that it defies Jewish and scientific sensibilities - if not Jewish law.
"If cloning was the way we were supposed to be fertile and replenish the Earth, as the Bible says, who needs Eve?" says Rosalie Ber, an international lecturer on bioethics and head of the Medical Education Department at Haifa's Technion - Israeli Institute of Technology.
But if Eve were created from Adam's rib, Ber noted, then she was, in a way, "the first clone."
If that were true, Genesis alone would refute the claims of the group Clonaid, which recently generated headlines with its unsubstantiated contention that its scientists have created the first cloned babies for couples in the United States and Holland.
The group is linked to a religious sect called the Raelians that believe space aliens created life on Earth. The group's head says he had this insight in 1973 after encountering a 4-foot-tall extraterrestrial called "Yahweh Elohim," Hebrew names for God.
Jewish experts on bioethics and halacha, or Jewish law, maintain that such stories are science fiction. Yet these experts say the cloning claims raise important questions for Jewish law and thought.
"Cloning is really a media hype," says Rabbi Gerald Wolpe, a leading author on Judaism and bioethics and director of the Jewish Theological Seminary's Louis Finkelstein Institute for Religious and Social Studies.
Wolpe and others doubt scientists will successfully clone humans any time soon, but while Jewish texts don't address such a possibility, "there is no real prohibition against it" in Jewish law, he says.
Nowhere do the Talmud or other authorities address the issue of engineering perfect replicas of human beings, Wolpe says, but Jewish law is clear about human eggs, the source of potential clones.
"Jewish law says embryos have no halachic position outside the mother's womb," Wolpe says. "There is no halachic ambiguity about that."
As for the argument that humans should not attempt to recreate other humans in God's image, Wolpe says science already does that today, with various methods of artificial reproduction such as in-vitro fertilization.
In Judaism, "we have a very simplistic approach. Pikuach nefesh," or saving a soul, "takes precedence over all other concerns," says Rabbi Moshe Tendler, a professor of biology at Yeshiva University in New York.
But Tendler, chairman of the Rabbinical Council of America's bioethics com-mittee, also fears that the media commotion about human cloning is producing a "smokescreen" that clouds a deeper issue.
Tendler is a proponent of such genetic engineering as stem-cell research, which he believes could save lives.
But he says the Bush administration is mixing religion and politics, using funda-mentalist Christian fears of cloning to limit federal aid for stem-cell research.
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