Next, Really Prolific Cows : Scientists clone a sheep, but we needn’t fret the doomsday scenarios
In the mid-1970s, scientists discovered how to reproduce, or clone, small segments of human DNA in order to produce medically useful hormones like insulin. Few scientists, however, believed that a human being’s entire genome could be used to create his or her exact genetic duplicate. But earlier this week, Scottish embryologist Ian Wilmut announced that he had successfully cloned a grown sheep, an astonishing achievement. Then he raised the astonishment level, declaring “there is no reason” that his technique could not be developed to clone humans as well.
The possibility now has Washington legislators scurrying to draft bills banning human cloning, as France, Britain and Germany already do. Cloning man has always been looked upon with great suspicion by most, and with wonder among others.
While a ban may be called for if workable human cloning techniques are devised, there is no cause for the kind of runaway anxieties first seen after the cloning breakthroughs in the 1970s. Such anxieties flow through Ben Bova’s 1976 novel “Multiple Man,” where no one knows whether a clone or the real President sits in the Oval Office, and in the 1978 film “The Boys from Brazil,” in which latter-day Nazis conspire to produce 94 clones of Adolf Hitler.
Such doomsday scenarios are bunk. They arise from the fallacy that people can be re-created simply by duplicating their genes. In fact, most genes produce specific traits only when the organism carrying those genes gets specific cues from its environment. Mozart’s genes may have predisposed him to musical genius, for example, but had he not been forced by poverty and a desire to support his family, he might not have been as brilliant or prolific.
Nevertheless, Wilmut’s work does raise some legitimate concerns. His team, for instance, is now trying to clone cows that produce up to 40,000 pounds of milk a year, about twice the average. If he is successful, then the market will motivate farmers to acquire only cows with those superproducing genes. But genetically identical livestock herds would be far more susceptible to untreatable, fatal diseases.
It’s the more distant dangers that understandably spook us. Lori Andrews, a professor of biomedical law at Chicago-Kent College, says we may soon be able to “clone great thinkers, beauties or athletes without their knowledge or consent. After all, all that would be needed would be some cells.”
As Dr. Ronald Munson, a medical ethicist at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, put it, “The genie is out of the bottle.”
