Protecting the Endangered Human: Toward an International Treaty Prohibiting Cloning and Inheritable Alterations

I. INTRODUCTION We humans tend to worry first about our own happiness, then about our families, then about our communities. In times of great stress, such as war or natural disaster, we may focus temporarily on our country but we rarely think about Earth as a whole or the human species as a whole. This narrow perspective, perhaps best exemplified by the American consumer, has led to the environmental degradation of our planet, a grossly widening gap in living standards between rich and poor people and nations and a scientific research agenda that focuses almost exclusively on the needs and desires of the wealthy few. Reversing the worldwide trends toward market-based atomization and increasing indifference to the suffering of others will require a human rights focus, forged by the development of what Vaclav Havel has termed a "species consciousness."1 In this Article we discuss human cloning and inheritable genetic alterations from the human species perspective, and suggest language for a proposed international "Convention of the Preservation of the Human Species" that would outlaw all efforts to initiate a pregnancy by using either intentionally modified genetic material or human replication cloning, such as through somatic cell nuclear transfer. We summarize international legal action in these areas over the past five years, relate these actions to arguments for and against a treaty and conclude with an action plan. B. HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE HUMAN SPECIES The development of the atomic bomb not only presented to the world for the first time the prospect of total annihilation, but also, paradoxically, led to a renewed emphasis on the "nuclear family," complete with its personal bomb shelter. The conclusion of World War II (with the dropping of the only two atomic bombs ever used in war) led to the recognition that world wars were now suicidal to the entire species and to the formation of the United Nations with the primary goal of preventing such wars.2 Prevention, of course, must be based on the recognition that all humans are fundamentally the same, rather than on an emphasis on our differences. In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war, President John F. Kennedy, in an address to the former Soviet Union, underscored the necessity for recognizing similarities for our survival: [L]et us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved .... For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.3 That we are all fundamentally the same, all human, all with the same dignity and rights, is at the core of the most important document to come out of World War II, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the two treaties that followed it (together known as the "International Bill of Rights").4 The recognition of universal human rights, based on human dignity and equality as well as the principle of nondiscrimination, is fundamental to the development of a species consciousness. As Daniel Lev of Human Rights Watch/Asia said in 1993, shortly before the Vienna Human Rights Conference: Whatever else may separate them, human beings belong to a single biological species, the simplest and most fundamental commonality before which the significance of human differences quickly fades .... We are all capable, in exactly the same ways, of feeling pain, hunger, and a hundred kinds of deprivation. Consequently, people nowhere routinely concede that those with enough power to do so ought to be able to kill, torture, imprison, and generally abuse others .... The idea of universal human rights shares the recognition of one common humanity. and provides a minimum solution to deal with its miseries.5 Membership in the human species is central to the meaning and enforcement of human rights, and respect for basic human rights is essential for the survival of the human species. …