The scientific significance of the announcement Sunday by a small Massachusetts biotechnology company that it had taken the first steps in creating human embryos through cloning is debatable – after all, the techniques used broke no new ground and all the embryos died. The political significance, however, is profound.

Regardless of the true size of the scientific breakthrough, Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester set a new standard for artless public relations. The company’s explanation for the bomb it dropped by publishing such preliminary results is that ethics compels it to keep other scientists informed. Plus, it’s good to be first when seeking new investors.

The experiments may not have produced embryos, but ACT’s hype produced plenty of hysteria. President Bush promptly denounced the work as immoral, Congress immediately began clearing its agenda for legislation to utterly ban the research, religious leaders predicted the establishment of human embryo farms.

Perhaps worst of all, the result of this media blitz and counterattack may well be the crippling in this country of stem-cell research that offers great hope to those suffering from such devastating ailments as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, heart disease and stroke. The trickle of American scientists overseas – to countries, such as Great Britain, that pass thoughtful legislation and fund research – is likely to become a flood.

The House approved legislation in July that would ban all human cloning, whether for reproductive or therapeutic purposes, a scattershot approach that failed to distinguish between potentially lifesaving therapeutic cloning, designed to produce stem cells for human therapy, and the reproductive cloning, designed to produce a human baby. The Senate tabled the bill, but now is under enormous pressure to replicate the House’s mistake.

It may be, as opponents of embryonic stem-cell research claim, that someday the techniques will be developed whereby this potentially disease-defeating therapy can be delivered to the patient through stem cells derived from someone else without rejection. That day is not at hand and for now experts agree that the best hope comes from embryonic stem cells derived from the patient’s own body.

The Senate should not destroy that hope. ACT’s announcement was much more a call to investors than the herald of a new scientific day. Therapeutic cloning has too much potential to save human lives to be dismissed as creating and then destroying a potential human life. A ban on implanting a human cloned embryo into a human womb addresses the most serious ethical issue, but a ban on all research into therapeutic cloning does nothing but destroy promise.