Clone Wars, Part II: Other fronts, other battles.

If the science of cloning is advancing rapidly, the politics of it are changing almost as fast. We've come a long way from the debates of the summer of 2001. Then the question was whether the federal government should fund research on stem cells taken from human embryos. The embryos would be destroyed in the process, but funding supporters reasoned that it was acceptable to destroy fertility clinics' surplus embryos. Many of these supporters said, however, that they opposed the creation of embryos for research purposes.

"Private companies are creating embryos specifically for stem cells, and I think that's a very bad idea . . . which gets on the path of cloning," Sen. Arlen Specter told Fox News in June 2001. Sens. Tom Daschle, Chris Dodd, Tom Harkin, and Orrin Hatch all said similar things. In July 2001, the House of Representatives voted 265-162 to ban human cloning for any purpose.

The bipartisan consensus against cloning proved short-lived. The Senate has not followed the House's lead on cloning. Indeed, all of the senators mentioned above now favor precisely what they once forswore: the creation, through cloning, of human embryos for research purposes. And they are all opposed to Sen. Sam Brownback's bill banning cloning entirely. Specter and Hatch are leading sponsors of a bill that would allow the cloning of embryos for research but forbid their implantation in a woman's womb. Scientists would be allowed to clone human embryos, so long as they destroy them in the process of research rather than let them develop into fetuses. Thus the National Right to Life Committee calls it a "clone-and-kill bill."

What will be the subject of next year's debate? Sen. Byron Dorgan's bill may offer a foretaste. It allows cloning and even implantation in the womb so long as these things are not done "for the purpose of creating a cloned human being." The bill does not define the term "human being," but it appears to open the door to developing cloned human fetuses for research.

Pro-life opponents of cloning regard the changed political environment as evidence that we're sliding down a slippery slope. But it could also be seen as a natural result of politicians' having to think on their feet about a new and challenging subject. The Supreme Court, which relieved them of the responsibility of arguing about embryonic human life in the abortion debate a generation ago, has not settled the status of cloning.

Hence the debate over cloning is robust. But it is stuck in questions of terminology. At first, the proponents of cloning for research created the phrase "therapeutic cloning," as distinguished from the "reproductive cloning" most of them oppose. In both cases, the procedure for cloning was the same: The cloner would remove the nucleus from an egg cell and replace it with the nucleus of a cell from the person he is cloning.

The term "therapeutic cloning" has fallen out of favor. For one thing, cloning research may not result in immediate benefits for patients (e.g., transplants developed from their clones). In January, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences argued that "the greatest benefit" of cloning would be the ability to study the progress of genetic diseases in cloned embryos.