Cloning humans: It’s going to happen

Originally published 21 September 1998

Ever since Dol­ly the cloned sheep made her bomb­shell debut last year, every­one is ask­ing, “What do you think of cloning?”

My answer has been to quote a com­ic I heard on British radio: “I don’t under­stand why sci­en­tists want to clone a sheep. I thought the whole point of sheep is that they are all the same.”

I resort to a joke because I haven’t sort­ed out how I feel about this new tech­nol­o­gy. A cloned sheep or two will not per­plex even the most moral­ly fas­tid­i­ous mind, but the prospect of cloned humans is enough to set alarm bells ringing.

What can be done for sheep can cer­tain­ly be done for humans too.

The present tech­nique for cloning involves tak­ing the nucle­us from a cell of the indi­vid­ual to be cloned and plac­ing it in an egg cell from which the nucle­us has been removed. The nucle­us con­tains the genet­ic infor­ma­tion that tells the egg how to devel­op into an adult organism.

The egg is then implant­ed in an uterus — any uterus — and allowed to grow.

Dol­ly was not the first ani­mal cloned by this method. How­ev­er, in all pre­vi­ous work, the gene-bear­ing nucle­us was obtained from fetal cells that had not yet become spe­cial­ized for par­tic­u­lar tasks — that is, only very young embryos were cloned. A tech­ni­cal tri­umph, to be sure, but hard­ly the stuff of scream­ing headlines.

In Dol­ly’s case, the genet­ic infor­ma­tion was tak­en from a mam­ma­ry cell of a six-year-old adult sheep. The cloned indi­vid­ual was more than just a micro­scop­ic clus­ter of undif­fer­en­ti­at­ed cells; she was “all growed up,” with a life, fam­i­ly, and friends of her own — so to speak.

Which means, in the case of humans, that it is a Bill Clin­ton or Moth­er Tere­sa or Mark McG­wire who might be dupli­cat­ed from a flake of skin or drop of sali­va. No won­der the news of Dol­ly gen­er­at­ed gasps of appre­hen­sion or shud­ders of despair.

For a while, we could more or less put it out of our minds. Some sci­en­tists sug­gest­ed that Dol­ly might not be all she was cracked up to be; that a fetal or embry­on­ic cell from anoth­er sheep or Dol­ly her­self might some­how have con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed the cells cul­tured from Dol­ly’s udder. And any­way, the cloning of Dol­ly was an unproven tech­nol­o­gy; it might be years before it could be applied to humans with a rea­son­able chance of success.

Now, Dol­ly’s tech­no­log­i­cal pedi­gree has been con­firmed by DNA analy­sis, and oth­er researchers have cloned a score of mice from adult cells with an appar­ent ease that makes the head swim. Mice are ide­al lab­o­ra­to­ry ani­mals, with short ges­ta­tion peri­ods. We can expect rapid progress in the tech­niques of cloning mammals.

Farm ani­mals and per­haps race hors­es will almost cer­tain­ly be the first com­mer­cial can­di­dates for cloning, although an anony­mous mil­lion­aire has con­tract­ed to pay $2.3 mil­lion to sci­en­tists at Texas A & M and Cal­i­for­nia-based Bio Arts and Research Corp. for a dupli­cate of his canine pet Missy.

Will human cloning fol­low? The apt­ly-named physi­cist Richard Seed has announced his inten­tion to clone him­self, with his wife bear­ing the result­ing embryo. All it takes is the will, the exper­tise and the mon­ey, and if he can raise the “Seed” mon­ey, the exper­tise will be cer­tain­ly be avail­able — as the Mis­sy project demonstrates.

Seed’s much-bal­ly­hooed project may be some­thing of a stunt, but seri­ous bio­med­ical researchers will not be far behind: in fact, they will like­ly lead the way. They will attempt to jus­ti­fy their work by empha­siz­ing poten­tial ben­e­fits to humankind: help­ing infer­tile cou­ples have a child, pro­duc­ing a child who could donate bone mar­row to a dying per­son, replac­ing a dead child.

But the bot­tom line is this: What can be done will be done, and there is very lit­tle any­one can do to stop it.

Two states — Michi­gan and Cal­i­for­nia — have passed laws ban­ning human cloning, and Con­gress may do the same for the nation. But human-cloning entre­pre­neurs will find a juris­dic­tion some­where in the world that per­mits their activ­i­ties. The tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties may be for­mi­da­ble, but they will be overcome.

Mean­while, what are us folks on the side­lines sup­posed to think about this brave new possibility?

The first ques­tion we should ask our­selves is: What is the basis for our almost uni­ver­sal sense that human cloning is wrong? Ethi­cist Leon Kass has said that a soci­ety that per­mits cloning “has for­got­ten how to shud­der.” Trust our gut instincts, he says. If it feels wrong, don’t do it.

But philoso­pher David Pap­ineau won­ders if gut feel­ings of repug­nance are reli­able guides to eth­i­cal behav­ior; they may rather be noth­ing more than habit­u­al prej­u­dice, he says. In the New York Times Book Review, he writes, “If it had been left to gut reac­tions, inter­ra­cial mar­riage would prob­a­bly still be banned, and slav­ery still allowed.”

Who is hurt by cloning? Many organ­isms repro­duce by mak­ing exact copies of them­selves. Nature even pro­duces human clones of sorts in the case of iden­ti­cal twins, and no one finds twins abhor­rent. Human beings are more than mere bio­log­i­cal con­tain­ers. We are indi­vid­u­al­ly unique repos­i­to­ries of expe­ri­ences, mem­o­ries, affec­tions, fears and dreams, and these things will nev­er be repro­duced in a laboratory.

Human cloning will hap­pen, as sure as sheep eat grass and mice run mazes. But it is hard to imag­ine that sex — love­ly, ago­niz­ing, ubiq­ui­tous sex — will ever be dis­placed as the pri­ma­ry mode of human reproduction.