If Only Everybody Could Be Just Like Me

Her name is Dolly.

And with apologies to tunesmith Jerry Herman, I’d like to offer her this song:

Hello, Dolly

You’re looking swell, Dolly

We can tell, Dolly

You’re still going, you’re still growing, you’re still cloning strong!

I sing the body eclectic. The Dolly celebrated here, of course, is just a little lamb trying to find her way. She is the creation of humans who are allegedly losing theirs.

Dolly is a replicant, believed to be the first clone of an adult mammal. She’s the pride and joy of embryologist Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh. The Scottish scientist announced that he had successfully replaced the genetic stuff of a sheep’s egg with the DNA from an adult ewe and thus created a lamb that is the elder’s genetic match.

Wilmut’s news was the most stunning birth announcement since, gosh, Michael Jackson’s.

Poor Dolly. Just 7 months old and already she’s the talk of the global village, the inspiration for so much excitement, wonder and fear. Especially fear. To hear some reactions, she is an augury of the brave new world--the lamb that may be leading us all to slaughter.

The fear is that Dolly will lead us, someday, into the age of human cloning. Man, in his arrogance and narcissism, could then duplicate himself, sort of. Talk about playing God. Man would be creating man in his own image.

But let’s not overreact. Let’s calm down and think about all this.

As Betty Odello, a bioethicist in the philosophy department at Pierce College, puts it: “Just because science could do it, should it be done is something we as a society need to address. Some scientists tend to think that whatever they can do, they ought to do. . . . Because science is moving so fast, we’re not taking time to think of all the repercussions that follow.”

As I write these words, a picture of Dolly is on my desk. She looks perfectly harmless, sort of like a fatter version of Lambchop. Or a younger version of those ewes in “Babe.”

Of course she looks harmless. Remember those “Twilight Zone” episodes in which cute kids and little dolls were evil incarnate? How do we know that Dolly, the idea of her, isn’t a monster in sheep’s clothing?

Religious people may have an easier time with such questions.

“They’ll say this is God’s territory and man shouldn’t go there,” Odello says. But the idea of human cloning appalls many agnostics as much as believers.

Arthur L. Caplan, director of the bioethics center at the University of Pennsylvania, offered this reaction to Times science writer Robert Lee Hotz: “This is so dangerous and worked so poorly it would be completely immoral to do it in people. Even to try it seems to be outrageously immoral. Could someone do this tomorrow morning in a human embryo? Yes. It would not even take too much science. The embryos are out there.”

Based on his survey of ethicists, Hotz wrote that “the idea of human cloning is so ethically repugnant that society may never allow people to run off multiple, identical copies of themselves on a kind of biological Xerox machine.”

Odello isn’t so sure about that. “I’d like to believe that,” she says. “Somehow I don’t have the confidence he does that it won’t happen.”

Odello, 55, bases this opinion on experience. She got her start in medicine as a teen-age nurse’s assistant and was a nurse when the first heart transplant raised profound moral questions. The dogma that portrayed the heart as the home of the soul was so strong that many people recoiled from the idea of an operation that is now commonplace.

And when the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its landmark abortion decision in Roe vs. Wade in 1973, Odello told her nursing colleagues that it would just be a matter of time before society took euthanasia seriously.

“Everybody said, ‘Oh, that’s so preposterous, Betty. We’ll never, ever legalize killing.’ ” But a generation later, society is wrestling with the question of doctor-assisted suicide.

We’ve been fooling around with Mother Nature for a long time, Odello points out. The question is, how far is too far?

She has, she says, “a lot of concerns.” Perhaps chief among them is “who decides who should be cloned. Which individual is a better individual that is worthy of being cloned? . . . Is it because they have the financial say? . . . When somebody gets the idea of what a perfect man is, then what happens?”

Better to leave cloning to the likes of Dolly and other livestock, Odello suggests. Her colleague Leland Shapiro, in Pierce’s animal and veterinary science department, is an advocate of cloning--for cows, not humans.

Shapiro’s been cloning cows the old-fashioned way--by splitting a fertilized embryo and placing them in “incubator” cows--since the 1970s. He waits until there are eight cells, then splits the embryo eight ways to make eight genetically identical cows. (His e-mail address begins drcows, as in Dr. Cows.)

“There are very good benefits as long as it’s safeguarded,” says Shapiro. Pierce College, he notes, has six cows that have produced more than 60,000 pounds of milk in a year’s time, compared to 16,000 from a typical cow. “If we could produce more of these cows, we’ll have less cows total eating less feed on less land, feeding more people.” There are thus ecological benefits and economic ones. Food has become cheaper by virtue of agricultural science, Shapiro says.

But the thought of human cloning gets Shapiro thinking of mad dictators creating trained assassins who could easily blend into foreign lands. I hadn’t thought of that one. I was thinking scarier thoughts. What if L. Ron Hubbard’s seed is being stored somewhere and Scientologists effect his resurrection? What if, after the Ovitz experiment, Michael Eisner gets desperate?

Not everybody thinks human cloning is such a bad idea. As public information director for both Pierce and Mission colleges, Ina Yates sees the benefits.

“I’ve tried to be two places at once. I’m always at the wrong college on the wrong day,” she sighs. “I miss all the good parties.”

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to Harris at the Times Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.