What's at stake in the 'cloning wars'?

(CNN) -- We may have gotten a glimpse this week of what's at stake in the "cloning wars" taking shape on Capitol Hill.

News came out of London that an 18-month-old boy named Rhys Evans had been successfully treated by gene therapy for a deadly genetic defect in his immune system.

Rhys was suffering from severe combined immune deficiency, SCID for short. It's a failure in the immune system caused by a single mistake in his genetic makeup. The disease is also known as "boy in the bubble" disease and was made famous by a movie starring John Travolta as a boy with the disease.

Rhys' case and those of a few other children in France are the first successes in the longtime efforts to treat disease at the genetic level, done by inserting a corrected copy of the defective gene into their bone marrow.

So what's the connection between gene therapy and the "cloning wars"? What may be at stake is the next generation of research on genetic diseases, since this is exactly the sort of research at issue in the cloning and stem cell research debates.

The debate about whether to ban the cloning of human embryos -- that is, making embryos that are the genetic twins of an existing person -- has been caught up in concerns both about what cloning means and where it could lead.

Conservative Republicans in the U.S. Senate want to propose legislation that would ban both reproductive cloning (to produce a baby) and cloning for research or to create stem cells for treatment. They worry that it devalues what embryos represent to clone them for any purpose.

Senate Democrats have countered with proposed legislation that would prevent people from making twins of themselves, but allow embryos to be cloned for research and treatment.

But what is at stake is more than concerns over a Brave New World future of cloned babies, since what we stand to forgo is the ability to determine the genetic causes of other diseases such as SCID, along with the next generation of treatments for the children who have them.

One problem with legislating science policy is that our lawmakers -- like the rest of us -- can't predict the future. And since the science of stem cell research is changing so fast, any legislation passed this session will be outdated almost immediately.

The prestigious National Academy of Sciences recently issued a report suggesting that not only making embryos, but cloning them, will be one important approach to unraveling the mysteries of diseases such as Lou Gehrig's disease and some cancers.

Of course, we don't know whether cloning embryos or some other technique will be the key to understanding diseases in the future. The point is that we should be careful about closing off potentially promising areas of research.

None of this is to say there is no moral cost in research that creates cloned human embryos -- there certainly is. But there is also moral cost in forgoing the benefits of such research.

The challenge is to know where to strike the balance, and as Democratic California Sen. Diane Feinstein has put it, to make sure we don't throw out the baby with the bath water.