Cloning Essay, Research Paper
Before we assume that the market for human clones consists mainly of narcissists who think the world deserves more of them or neo-Nazis who dream of cloning Hitler or crackpots and mavericks and mischief makers of all kinds, it is worth taking a tour of the marketplace. We might just meet ourselves there.
Imagine for a moment that your daughter needs a bone-marrow transplant and no one can provide a match; that your wife’s early menopause has made her infertile; or that your five-year-old has drowned in a lake and your grief has made it impossible to get your mind around the fact that he is gone forever. Would the news then really be so easy to dismiss that around the world, there are scientists in labs pressing ahead with plans to duplicate a human being, deploying the same technology that allowed Scottish scientists to clone Dolly the sheep four years ago?
All it took was that first headline about the astonishing ewe, and fertility experts began to hear the questions every day. Our two-year-old daughter died in a car crash; we saved a lock of her hair in a baby book. Can you clone her? Why does the law allow people more freedom to destroy fetuses than to create them? My husband had cancer and is sterile. Can you help us?
The inquiries are pouring in because some scientists are ever more willing to say yes, perhaps we can. Last month a well-known infertility specialist, Panayiotis Zavos of the University of Kentucky, announced that he and Italian researcher Severino Antinori, the man who almost seven years ago helped a 62-year-old woman give birth using donor eggs, were forming a consortium to produce the first human clone. Researchers in South Korea claim they have already created a cloned human embryo, though they destroyed it rather than implanting it in a surrogate mother to develop. Recent cover stories in Wired and the New York Times Magazine tracked the efforts of the Raelians, a religious group committed to, among other things, welcoming the first extraterrestrials when they appear. They intend to clone the cells of a dead 10-month-old boy whose devastated parents hope, in effect, to bring him back to life as a newborn. The Raelians say they have the lab and the scientists, and–most important, considering the amount of trial and error involved–they say they have 50 women lined up to act as surrogates to carry a cloned baby to term.
Given what researchers have learned since Dolly, no one thinks the mechanics of cloning are very hard: take a donor egg, suck out the nucleus, and hence the DNA, and fuse it with, say, a skin cell from the human being copied. Then, with the help of an electrical current, the reconstituted cell should begin growing into a genetic duplicate. “It’s inevitable that someone will try and someone will succeed,” predicts Delores Lamb, an infertility expert at Baylor University. The consensus among biotechnology specialists is that within a few years–some scientists believe a few months–the news will break of the birth of the first human clone.
At that moment, at least two things will happen–one private, one public. The meaning of what it is to be human–which until now has involved, at the very least, the mysterious melding of two different people’s DNA–will shift forever, along with our understanding of the relationship between parents and children, means and ends, ends and beginnings. And as a result, the conversation that has occupied scientists and ethicists for years, about how much man should mess with nature when it comes to reproduction, will drop onto every kitchen table, every pulpit, every politician’s desk. Our fierce national debate over issues like abortion and euthanasia will seem tame and transparent compared with the questions that human cloning raises.
That has many scientists scared to death. Because even if all these headlines are hype and we are actually far away from seeing the first human clone, the very fact that at this moment, the research is proceeding underground, unaccountable, poses a real threat. The risk lies not just with potential babies born deformed, as many animal clones are; not just with desperate couples and cancer patients and other potential “clients” whose hopes may be raised and hearts broken and life savings wiped out. The immediate risk is that a backlash against renegade science might strike at responsible science as well.
The more scared people are of some of this research, scientists worry, the less likely they are to tolerate any of it. Yet variations on cloning technology are already used in biotechnology labs all across the country. It is these techniques that will allow, among other things, the creation of cloned herds of sheep and cows that produce medicines in their milk. Researchers also hope that one day, the ability to clone adult human cells will make it possible to “grow” new hearts and livers and nerve cells.
But some of the same techniques could also be used to grow a baby. Trying to block one line of research could impede another and so reduce the chances of finding cures for ailments such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, cancer and heart disease. Were some shocking breakthrough in human cloning to cause “an overcompensatory response by legislators,” says Rockefeller University cloning expert Tony Perry, “that could be disastrous. At some point, it will potentially cost lives.” So we are left with choices and trade-offs and a need to think through whether it is this technology that alarms us or just certain ways of using it.
By day, Randolfe Wicker, 63, runs a lighting shop in New York City. But in his spare time, as spokesman for the Human Cloning Foundation, he is the face of cloning fervor in the U.S. “I took one step in this adventure, and it took over me like quicksand,” says Wicker. He is planning to have some of his skin cells stored for future cloning. “If I’m not cloned before I die, my estate will be set up so that I can be cloned after,” he says, admitting, however, that he hasn’t found a lawyer willing to help. “It’s hard to write a will with all these uncertainties,” he concedes. “A lot of lawyers will look at me crazy.”
As a gay man, Wicker has long been frustrated that he cannot readily have children of his own; as he gets older, his desire to reproduce grows stronger. He knows that a clone would not be a photocopy of him but talks about the traits the boy might possess: “He will like the color blue, Middle Eastern food and romantic Spanish music that’s out of fashion.” And then he hints at the heart of his motive. “I can thumb my nose at Mr. Death and say, ‘You might get me, but you’re not going to get all of me,’” he says. “The special formula that is me will live on into another lifetime. It’s a partial triumph over death. I would leave my imprint not in sand but in cement.”
This kind of talk makes ethicists conclude that even people who think they know about cloning–let alone the rest of us–don’t fully understand its implications. Cloning, notes ethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania, “can’t make you immortal because clearly the clone is a different person. If I take twins and shoot one of them, it will be faint consolation to the dead one that the other one is still running around, even though they are genetically identical. So the road to immortality is not through cloning.”
Still, cloning is the kind of issue so confounding that you envy the purists at either end of the argument. For the Roman Catholic Church, the entire question is one of world view: whether life is a gift of love or just one more industrial product, a little more valuable than most. Those who believe that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception think it is fine for God to make clones; he does it about 4,000 times a day, when a fertilized egg splits into identical twins. But when it comes to massaging a human life, for the scientist to do mechanically what God does naturally is to interfere with his work, and no possible benefit can justify that presumption.
On the other end of the argument are the libertarians who don’t like politicians or clerics or ethics boards interfering with what they believe should be purely individual decisions. Reproduction is a most fateful lottery; in their view, cloning allows you to hedge your bet. While grieving parents may be confused about the technology–cloning, even if it works, is not resurrection–their motives are their own business. As for infertile couples, “we are interested in giving people the gift of life,” Zavos, the aspiring cloner, told TIME this week. “Ethics is a wonderful word, but we need to look beyond the ethical issues here. It’s not an ethical issue. It’s a medical issue. We have a duty here. Some people need this to complete the life cycle, to reproduce.”
In the messy middle are the vast majority of people who view the prospect with a vague alarm, an uneasy sense that science is dragging us into dark woods with no paths and no easy way to turn back. Ian Wilmut, the scientist who cloned Dolly but has come out publicly against human cloning, was not trying to help sheep have genetically related children. “He was trying to help farmers produce genetically improved sheep,” notes Hastings Center ethicist Erik Parens. “And surely that’s how the technology will go with us too.” Cloning, Parens says, “is not simply this isolated technique out there that a few deluded folks are going to avail themselves of, whether they think it is a key to immortality or a way to bring someone back from the dead. It’s part of a much bigger project. Essentially the big-picture question is, To what extent do we want to go down the path of using reproductive technologies to genetically shape our children?”
At the moment, the American public is plainly not ready to move quickly on cloning. In a TIME/CNN poll last week, 90% of respondents thought it was a bad idea to clone human beings. “Cloning right now looks like it’s coming to us on a magic carpet, piloted by a cult leader, sold to whoever can afford it,” says ethicist Caplan. “That makes people nervous.”
And it helps explain why so much of the research is being done secretly. We may learn of the first human clone only months, even years, after he or she is born–if the event hasn’t happened already, as some scientists speculate. The team that cloned Dolly waited until she was seven months old to announce her existence. Creating her took 277 tries, and right up until her birth, scientists around the world were saying that cloning a mammal from an adult cell was impossible. “There’s a significant gap between what scientists are willing to talk about in public and their private aspirations,” says British futurist Patrick Dixon. “The law of genetics is that the work is always significantly further ahead than the news. In the digital world, everything is hyped because there are no moral issues–there is just media excitement. Gene technology creates so many ethical issues that scientists are scared stiff of a public reaction if the end results of their research are known.”
Of course, attitudes often change over time. In-vitro fertilization was effectively illegal in many states 20 years ago, and the idea of transplanting a heart was once considered horrifying. Public opinion on cloning will evolve just as it did on these issues, advocates predict. But in the meantime, the crusaders are mostly driven underground. Princeton biologist Lee Silver says fertility specialists have told him that they have no problem with cloning and would be happy to provide it as a service to their clients who could afford it. But these same specialists would never tell inquiring reporters that, Silver says–it’s too hot a topic right now. “I think what’s happened is that all the mainstream doctors have taken a hands-off approach because of this huge public outcry. But I think what they are hoping is that some fringe group will pioneer it and that it will slowly come into the mainstream and then they will be able to provide it to their patients.”
All it will take, some predict, is that first snapshot. “Once you have a picture of a normal baby with 10 fingers and 10 toes, that changes everything,” says San Mateo, Calif., attorney and cloning advocate Mark Eibert, who gets inquiries from infertile couples every day. “Once they put a child in front of the cameras, they’ve won.” On the other hand, notes Gregory Pence, a professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and author of Who’s Afraid of Human Cloning?, “if the first baby is defective, cloning will be banned for the next 100 years.”
“I wouldn’t mind being the first person cloned if it were free. I don’t mind being a guinea pig,” says Doug Dorner, 35. He and his wife Nancy both work in health care. “We’re not afraid of technology,” he says. Dorner has known since he was 16 that he would never be able to have children the old-fashioned way. A battle with lymphoma left him sterile, so when he and Nancy started thinking of having children, he began following the scientific developments in cloning more closely. The more he read, the more excited he got. “Technology saved my life when I was 16,” he says, but at the cost of his fertility. “I think technology should help me have a kid. That’s a fair trade.”
Talk to the Dorners, and you get a glimpse of choices that most parents can scarcely imagine having to make. Which parent, for instance, would they want to clone? Nancy feels she would be bonded to the child just from carrying him, so why not let the child have Doug’s genetic material? Does it bother her to know she would, in effect, be raising her husband as a little boy? “It wouldn’t be that different. He already acts like a five-year-old sometimes,” she says with a laugh.
How do they imagine raising a cloned child, given the knowledge they would have going in? “I’d know exactly what his basic drives were,” says Doug. The boy’s dreams and aspirations, however, would be his own, Doug insists. “I used to dream of being a fighter pilot,” he recalls, a dream lost when he got cancer. While they are at it, why not clone Doug twice? “Hmm. Two of the same kid,” Doug ponders. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. But I know we’d never clone our clone to have a second child. Once you start copying something, who knows what the next copies will be like?”
In fact the risks involved with cloning mammals are so great that Wilmut, the premier cloner, calls it “criminally irresponsible” for scientists to be experimenting on humans today. Even after four years of practice with animal cloning, the failure rate is still overwhelming: 98% of embryos never implant or die off during gestation or soon after birth. Animals that survive can be nearly twice as big at birth as is normal, or have extra-large organs or heart trouble or poor immune systems. Dolly’s “mother” was six years old when she was cloned. That may explain why Dolly’s cells show signs of being older than they actually are–scientists joked that she was really a sheep in lamb’s clothing. This deviation raises the possibility that beings created by cloning adults will age abnormally fast.
We had a cloned sheep born just before Christmas that was clearly not normal,” says Wilmut. “We hoped for a few days it would improve and then, out of kindness, we euthanized it, because it obviously would never be healthy.” Wilmut believes “it is almost a certainty” that cloned human children would be born with similar maladies. Of course, we don’t euthanize babies. But these kids would probably die very prematurely anyway. Wilmut pauses to consider the genie he has released with Dolly and the hopes he has raised. “It seems such a profound irony,” he says, “that in trying to make a copy of a child who has died tragically, one of the most likely outcomes is another dead child.”
That does not seem to deter the scientists who work on the Clonaid project run by the Raelian sect. They say they are willing to try to clone a dead child. Though their outfit is easy to mock, they may be even further along than the competition, in part because they have an advantage over other teams. A formidable obstacle to human cloning is that donor eggs are a rare commodity, as are potential surrogate mothers, and the Raelians claim to have a supply of both.
Earlier this month, according to Brigitte Boisselier, Clonaid’s scientific director, somewhere in North America, a young woman walked into a Clonaid laboratory whose location is kept secret. Then, in a procedure that has been done thousands of times, a doctor inserted a probe, removed 15 eggs from the woman’s ovaries and placed them in a chemical soup. Last week two other Clonaid scientists, according to the group, practiced the delicate art of removing the genetic material from each of the woman’s eggs. Within the next few weeks, the Raelian scientific team plans to place another cell next to the enucleated egg.
This second cell, they say, comes from a 10-month-old boy who died during surgery. The two cells will be hit with an electrical charge, according to the scenario, and will fuse, forming a new hybrid cell that no longer has the genes of the young woman but now has the genes of the dead child. Once the single cell has developed into six to eight cells, the next step is to follow the existing, standard technology of assisted reproduction: gingerly insert the embryo into a woman’s womb and hope it implants. Clonaid scientists expect to have implanted the first cloned human embryo in a surrogate mother by next month.