Even if the technology is basic, and even if it appeals to some infertile couples, should grieving parents really be pursuing this route? “It’s a sign of our growing despotism over the next generation,” argues University of Chicago bioethicist Leon Kass. Cloning introduces the possibility of parents’ making choices for their children far more fundamental than whether to give them piano lessons or straighten their teeth. “It’s not just that parents will have particular hopes for these children,” says Kass. “They will have expectations based on a life that has already been lived. What a thing to do–to carry on the life of a person who has died.”
The libertarians are ready with their answers. “I think we’re hypercritical about people’s reasons for having children,” says Pence. “If they want to re-create their dead children, so what?” People have always had self-serving reasons for having children, he argues, whether to ensure there’s someone to care for them in their old age or to relive their youth vicariously. Cloning is just another reproductive tool; the fact that it is not a perfect tool, in Pence’s view, should not mean it should be outlawed altogether. “We know there are millions of girls who smoke and drink during pregnancy, and we know what the risks to the fetus are, but we don’t do anything about it,” he notes. “If we’re going to regulate cloning, maybe we should regulate that too.”
Olga Tomusyak was two weeks shy of her seventh birthday when she fell out of the window of her family’s apartment. Her parents could barely speak for a week after she died. “Life is empty without her,” says her mother Tanya, a computer programmer in Sydney, Australia. “Other parents we have talked to who have lost children say it will never go away.” Olga’s parents cremated the child before thinking of the cloning option. All that remains are their memories, some strands of hair and three baby teeth, so they have begun investigating whether the teeth could yield the nuclei to clone her one day. While it is theoretically possible to extract DNA from the teeth, scientists say it is extremely unlikely.
“You can’t expect the new baby will be exactly like her. We know that is not possible,” says Tanya. “We think of the clone as her twin or at least a baby who will look like her.” The parents would consider the new little girl as much Olga’s baby as their own. “Anything that grows from her will remind us of her,” says Tanya. Though she and her husband are young enough to have other children, for now, this is the child they want.
Once parents begin to entertain the option of holding on to some part of a child, why would the reverse not be true? “Bill” is a guidance counselor in Southern California, a fortysomething expectant father who has been learning everything he can about the process of cloning. But it is not a lost child he is looking to replicate. He is interested in cloning his mother, who is dying of pancreatic cancer. He has talked to her husband, his siblings, everyone except her doctor–and her, for fear that it will make her think they have given up hope on her. He confides, “We might end up making a decision without telling her.”
His goal is to extract a tissue specimen from his mother while it’s still possible and store it, to await the day when–if–cloning becomes technically safe and socially acceptable. Late last week, as his mother’s health weakened, the family began considering bringing up the subject with her because they need her cooperation to take the sample. Meanwhile, Bill has already contacted two labs about tissue storage, one as a backup. “I’m in touch with a couple of different people who might be doing that,” he says, adding that both are in the U.S. “It seems like a little bit of an underground movement, you know–people are a little reluctant that if they announce it, they might be targeted, like the abortion clinics.”
If Bill’s hopes were to materialize and the clone were born, who would that person be? “It wouldn’t be my mother but a person who would be very similar to my mother, with certain traits. She has a lot of great traits: compassion and intelligence and looks,” he says. And yet, perhaps inevitably, he talks as though this is a way to rewind and replay the life of someone he loves. “She really didn’t have the opportunities we had in the baby-boom generation, because her parents experienced the Depression and the war,” he says. “So the feeling is that maybe we could give her some opportunities that she didn’t have. It would be sort of like we’re taking care of her now. You know how when your parents age and everything shifts, you start taking care of them? Well, this would be an extension of that.”
A world in which cloning is commonplace confounds every human relationship, often in ways most potential clients haven’t considered. For instance, if a woman gives birth to her own clone, is the child her daughter or her sister? Or, says bioethicist Kass, “let’s say the child grows up to be the spitting image of its mother. What impact will that have on the relationship between the father and his child if that child looks exactly like the woman he fell in love with?” Or, he continues, “let’s say the parents have a cloned son and then get divorced. How will the mother feel about seeing a copy of the person she hates most in the world every day? Everyone thinks about cloning from the point of view of the parents. No one looks at it from the point of view of the clone.”
If infertile couples avoid the complications of choosing which of them to clone and instead look elsewhere for their DNA, what sorts of values govern that choice? Do they pick an uncle because he’s musical, a willing neighbor because she’s brilliant? Through that door lies the whole unsettling debate about designer babies, fueled already by the commercial sperm banks that promise genius DNA to prospective parents. Sperm banks give you a shot at passing along certain traits; cloning all but assures it.
Whatever the moral quandaries, the one-stop-shopping aspect of cloning is a plus to many gay couples. Lesbians would have the chance to give birth with no male involved at all; one woman could contribute the ovum, the other the DNA. Christine DeShazo and her partner Michele Thomas of Miramar, Fla., have been in touch with Zavos about producing a baby this way. Because they have already been ostracized as homosexuals, they aren’t worried about the added social sting that would come with cloning. “Now [people] would say, ‘Not only are you a lesbian, you are a cloning lesbian,’” says Thomas. As for potential health problems, “I would love our baby if its hand was attached to its head,” she says. DeShazo adds, “If it came out green, I would love it. Our little alien…”
Just as women have long been able to have children without a male sexual partner, through artificial insemination, men could potentially become dads alone: replace the DNA from a donor egg with one’s own and then recruit a surrogate mother to carry the child. Some gay-rights advocates even argue that should sexual preference prove to have a biological basis, and should genetic screening lead to terminations of gay embryos, homosexuals would have an obligation to produce gay children through cloning.
All sorts of people might be attracted to the idea of the ultimate experiment in single parenthood. Jack Barker, a marketing specialist for a corporate-relocation company in Minneapolis, is 36 and happily unmarried. “I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t need a partner but can still have a child,” he says. “And a clone would be the perfect child to have because I know exactly what I’m getting.” He understands that the child would not be a copy of him. “We’d be genetically identical,” says Barker. “But he wouldn’t be raised by my parents–he’d be raised by me.” Cloning, he hopes, might even let him improve on the original: “I have bad allergies and asthma. It would be nice to have a kid like you but with those improvements.”
Cloning advocates view the possibilities as a kind of liberation from travails assumed to be part of life: the danger that your baby will be born with a disease that will kill him or her, the risk that you may one day need a replacement organ and die waiting for it, the helplessness you feel when confronted with unbearable loss. The challenge facing cloning pioneers is to make the case convincingly that the technology itself is not immoral, however immorally it could be used.
One obvious way is to point to the broader benefits. Thus cloning proponents like to attach themselves to the whole arena of stem-cell research, the brave new world of inquiry into how the wonderfully pliable cells of seven-day-old embryos behave. Embryonic stem cells eventually turn into every kind of tissue, including brain, muscle, nerve and blood. If scientists could harness their powers, these cells could serve as the body’s self-repair kit, providing cures for Parkinson’s, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and paralysis. Actors Christopher Reeve, paralyzed by a fall from a horse, and Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s, are among those who have pushed Congress to overturn the government’s restrictions on federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research.
But if the cloners want to climb on this train in hopes of riding it to a public relations victory, the mainstream scientists want to push them off. Because researchers see the potential benefits of understanding embryonic stem cells as immense, they are intent on avoiding controversy over their use. Being linked with the human-cloning activists is their nightmare. Says Michael West, president of Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology, a biotech company that uses cloning technology to develop human medicines: “We’re really concerned that if someone goes off and clones a Raelian, there could be an overreaction to this craziness–especially by regulators and Congress. We’re desperately concerned–and it’s a bad metaphor–about throwing the baby out with the bath water.”
Scientists at ACT are leery of revealing too much about their animal-cloning research, much less their work on human embryos. “What we’re doing is the first step toward cloning a human being, but we’re not cloning a human being,” says West. “The miracle of cloning isn’t what people think it is. Cloning allows you to make a genetically identical copy of an animal, yes, but in the eyes of a biologist, the real miracle is seeing a skin cell being put back into the egg cell, taking it back in time to when it was an undifferentiated cell, which then can turn into any cell in the body.” Which means that new, pristine tissue could be grown in labs to replace damaged or diseased parts of the body. And since these replacement parts would be produced using skin or other cells from the suffering patient, there would be no risk of rejection. “That means you’ve solved the age-old problem of transplantation,” says West. “It’s huge.”
So far, the main source of embryonic stem cells is “leftover” embryos from IVF clinics; cloning embryos could provide an almost unlimited source. Progress could come even faster if Congress were to lift the restrictions on federal funding–which might have the added safety benefit of the federal oversight that comes with federal dollars. “We’re concerned about George W.’s position and whether he’ll let existing guidelines stay in place,” says West. “People are begging to work on those cells.”
That impulse is enough to put the Roman Catholic Church in full revolt; the Vatican has long condemned any research that involves creating and experimenting with human embryos, the vast majority of which inevitably perish. The church believes that the soul is created at the moment of conception, and that the embryo is worthy of protection. It reportedly took 104 attempts before the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, was born; cloning Dolly took more than twice that. Imagine, say opponents, how many embryos would be lost in the effort to clone a human. This loss is mass murder, says David Byers, director of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ commission on science and human values. “Each of the embryos is a human being simply by dint of its genetic makeup.”
Last week 160 bishops and five Cardinals met for three days behind closed doors in Irving, Texas, to wrestle with the issues biotechnology presents. But the cloning debate does not break cleanly even along religious lines. “Rebecca,” a thirtysomething San Francisco Bay Area resident, spent seven years trying to conceive a child with her husband. Having “been to hell and back” with IVF treatment, Rebecca is now as thoroughly committed to cloning as she is to Christianity. “It’s in the Bible–be fruitful and multiply,” she says. “People say, ‘You’re playing God.’ But we’re not. We’re using the raw materials the good Lord gave us. What does the doctor do when the heart has stopped? They have to do direct massage of the heart. You could say the doctor is playing God. But we save a life. With human cloning, we’re not so much saving a life as creating a new being by manipulation of the raw materials, DNA, the blueprint for life. You’re simply using it in a more creative manner.”
A field where emotions run so strong and hope runs so deep is fertile ground for profiteers and charlatans. In her effort to clone her daughter Olga, Tanya Tomusyak contacted an Australian firm, Southern Cross Genetics, which was founded three years ago by entrepreneur Graeme Sloan to preserve DNA for future cloning. In an e-mail, Sloan told the parents that Olga’s teeth would provide more than enough DNA–even though that possibility is remote. “All DNA samples are placed into computer-controlled liquid-nitrogen tanks for long-term storage,” he wrote. “The cost of doing a DNA fingerprint and genetic profile and placing the sample into storage would be $2,500. Please note that all of our fees are in U.S. dollars.”
When contacted by TIME, Sloan admitted, “I don’t have a scientific background. I’m pure business. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t here to make a dollar out of it. But I would like to see organ cloning become a reality.” He was inspired to launch the business, he says, after a young cousin died of leukemia. “There’s megadollars involved, and everyone is racing to be the first,” he says. As for his own slice of the pie, Sloan says he just sold his firm to a French company, which he refuses to name, and he was heading for Hawaii last week. The Southern Cross factory address turns out to be his mother’s house, and his “office” phone is answered by a man claiming to be his brother David–although his mother says she has no son by that name.
The more such peddlers proliferate, the more politicians will be tempted to invoke prohibitions. Four states–California, Louisiana, Michigan and Rhode Island–have already banned human cloning, and this spring Texas may become the fifth. Republican state senator Jane Nelson has introduced a bill in Austin that would impose a fine of as much as $1 million for researchers who use cloning technology to initiate pregnancy in humans. The proposed Texas law would permit embryonic-stem-cell research, but bills proposed in other states were so broadly written that they could have stopped those activities too.
“The short answer to the cloning question,” says ethicist Caplan, “is that anybody who clones somebody today should be arrested. It would be barbaric human experimentation. It would be killing fetuses and embryos for no purpose, none, except for curiosity. But if you can’t agree that that’s wrong to do, and if the media can’t agree to condemn rather than gawk, that’s a condemnation of us all.”
Here is what people are saying:
At 11:50 AM John said: Whether you believe in a supreme being or not, it would be very stupid to let this gift go to waste by not using it. It just needs to be monitered.
At 11:52 AM George W. said: As long as we don’t ever clone antone in the Clinton family, this entire ordeal will be fine.
At 12:00 PM Doug said: What is all the fuss about? Cloning is going to help us better our society. Who are we to say that a cloned baby has no soul?
At 2:37 PM Who Knows said: There is no use regulating science. If you try to suppress it, it will maifest itself in the hands of some scientists who have evil intentions. So is it not better that we investigate this phenomenon and know all about this stuff than sitting like lame ducks when this technology is used for an evil purpose (and beleive me, it will be). “Who Knows” whats going to happen…
At 2:42 PM kevin said: It’s true that God said “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”gen 1:28 However, He has given the rule by which we should do so. “and the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone, I will make him an help meet for him.”gen 2:18 Also true is that sin is a reality and because of it many disease and complications exist in the world today. So I very much understand the issue of not being able to produce a child because of ill, However, adoption is another choice. What better way to please the Heavenly Father than to adopt a lonely child needing parents, their by fulfilling His character of love.