Sheep Clone Researcher Calls for Caution
Dr. Ian Wilmut--the soft-spoken British scientist who gained overnight fame for creating a cloned sheep named Dolly--made his American debut Wednesday, telling a Senate panel that he would welcome an international drive to ban the cloning of humans.
But at the same time, the 52-year-old embryologist urged lawmakers to be careful about restricting scientific pursuit of the technology he has pioneered, noting that it holds great promise for animal husbandry and the treatment of human disease.
“In the wish to prevent any misuses of the technology, it is important that we preserve the opportunities to take advantage of all of the benefits,” Wilmut said. “It’s important that we do not throw out this particular baby with the bathwater.”
The balding, bearded researcher had come to the United States at the invitation of Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), whose subcommittee is grappling with the thorny bioethical issues raised by Wilmut’s work. Though Wilmut echoed the widespread consensus that human cloning is deplorable, one senator--Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)--offered an impassioned defense of it, saying: “I don’t fear it at all. I welcome it.”
The British researcher was the star of Wednesday’s hearing--so much so that another well-known scientist, Dr. Harold E. Varmus, a Nobel laureate and director of the National Institutes of Health, referred to himself as “the warmup act to Dr. Wilmut.”
Yet Wilmut, who made history by becoming the first person ever to clone an adult mammal, seemed genuinely perplexed at the international sensation he has created.
He confessed at a packed news conference that “the sheer scale of interest has taken me by surprise.” He patiently answered reporters’ questions about his religious beliefs (“I categorize myself as an agnostic”) and whether human cloning is inevitable (“That’s up to all of us. You have as much say in that as I do.”)
He sat silently as Harkin proclaimed him “one of the true trailblazers in human history.”
When Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) asked if he had any ideas for safeguards against human cloning, he politely demurred, saying: “No sir. I defer to you.”
When his testimony was over and the questions were finished, he quickly left the room, leaving the lawmakers and another succession of witnesses--including three ethics experts--to debate the role of government in regulating science.
Already, bills have been introduced in both the House and Senate to ban federal funding of human cloning research. The author of the Senate bill, Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), on Wednesday urged the lawmakers to act quickly on the legislation, saying: “I believe there are aspects of life that should be off-limits to science.”
But Harkin delivered a blistering five-minute dissent, suggesting that President Clinton had exceeded his authority last week when he imposed a moratorium on federal funding of human cloning research.
“I don’t think there are any appropriate limits to human knowledge,” Harkin declared. “None, whatsoever. . . . To my friends Sen. Bond and President Clinton who are saying, ‘Stop, we can’t play God,’ I say, ‘Fine. Take your ranks alongside Pope Paul V, who in 1616 tried to stop Galileo. . . . What utter, utter nonsense to think that somehow we can hold up our hand and say, ‘Stop.’ ”
When Harkin went so far as to predict that human cloning would take place in his lifetime, Wilmut replied: “I hope you are wrong.”
Wilmut said he has yet to hear of a rationale--even re-creating a dying child--that would make cloning morally defensible. But he noted that the “nuclear transfer technology” employed in cloning could provide great benefits to humans, without being used to create people.
Cattle, for instance, might be cloned to produce milk that contains human proteins needed to treat such genetic diseases as hemophilia. Pigs might be cloned as a source of organs for human transplantation. Animals might also be cloned for use as models in the study of genetic disorders.
It took Wilmut and his collaborators at Scotland’s Roslin Institute more than a decade of painstaking research to engineer Dolly. Their technique involved scraping cells from the udder of an adult sheep, then inserting genetic material from those cells into an unfertilized sheep egg that had been stripped of its own DNA. Using methods similar to in vitro fertilization, the scientists transferred the egg to a surrogate mother. Of 277 attempts, only one healthy lamb was born.
The experiment, reported in the scientific journal Nature on Feb. 27, has not been replicated. Both Wilmut and Varmus testified that as far as they know, no scientist is trying to clone humans. To do so would be extremely dangerous, they said, given all the sheep that died before Dolly was born.
“You shouldn’t underestimate the difficulties of this research,” Wilmut cautioned.
Thus the debate over human cloning, while conducted with great urgency Wednesday, remains largely theoretical.
Indeed, while some have suggested that the science of cloning is proceeding so quickly that public policymakers cannot keep up, Varmus said that precisely the opposite is true: “It strikes me that, in this situation, the discussion is actually running ahead of science and not the other way around.”
