Animals Are One Thing, Humans Quite Another
Human clones can be made but not born. That’s the naive verdict of President Clinton, and also of advisors to the British government. Make clones for medical research, to grow human tissues, but don’t implant them into the womb.
Take a cell from your body, place it against a human egg from which genes have been removed, add a spark of electricity and the two become one. The egg thinks it’s been fertilized and begins to grow rapidly as a clone. Success rates will soon be 75%, judging by the latest Japanese work with cows.
Some American scientists want to clone babies, and the only thing stopping them is knowing how to make that first embryo. And 6% of the public want it too. A woman tells me she wants to clone her dad and have “him” as a baby. The latest British “yes” to human cloning research is a massive Christmas present to them all.
People like Dr. Richard Seed, with $15 million for his new Japanese cloning lab, will sit back while British and American experts crack this final step--and they soon will, backed by multinationals. When Dolly the sheep was cloned, the stock market value of PPL Therapeutics rose by $60 million. Once the “therapeutic” frontier has been crossed, the baby cloners will start.
Clones will be made in America or with American technology but be born elsewhere. Making cloned babies has real dangers. Terrible mutations could result as well as huge emotional risks to the child. What will it do to a cloned son to look at his dad and see his twin brother, his mother and see his sister-in-law? The cloned daughter knows that she’ll have impacted wisdom teeth on her 15th birthday, she’ll be gray at 40 and suspects her mother is giving her music lessons to prove how talented her own genes are. And there are serious risks of abuse by weirdos and the powerful.
Scientists are usually secretive about cloning. In the 1980s, a British embryologist told me of his own cloning attempts, aiming to insert a clone into a surrogate mother and cull it for spares at, say, 22 weeks. To this day, he has never dared talk openly.
In 1993, infertility specialist Jerry Hall in Washington stunned the world by having already cloned human embryos by artificial twinning--separating each ball of cells into several. All were destroyed. Advanced Cell Technology has admitted that one of its scientists had cloned himself three years ago using a cow’s egg (the embryo was destroyed).
That’s before Dolly was even born in Britain. And Dolly herself was 7 months old before her creators admitted her existence; she had been conceived many months before from work begun earlier still.
The big question is what has been going on over the past two or three years? If human clones have already been made, how would we know?
People imagine that scientists can clone tissues for treatment without making whole embryos but they can’t. The technology is identical, whether you implant a clone to be born, cull it for spare parts or cannibalize it before implantation to make a human tissue factory out of embryonic cells.
You can’t grow organs from cells. If you want organs, you have to take them from a late-pregnancy fetus. You will only grow, perhaps, bone marrow or nerve tissue.
But is it always absolutely right to pursue every possible treatment option? In 1993, a British doctor suggested taking 2 million eggs from the ovaries of an aborted female fetus. There was outrage, and it was banned--a step too far even if it denied some people treatment.
Many people in America are deeply uneasy about deliberately creating an identical twin embryo of an existing person with the express purpose of destroying it for use of its tissues.
Human embryos are more than bags of biodata, wherever you stand on pro-choice or pro-life. They have all the promise of a beautiful baby son or daughter.
As a doctor, I know we need gene technology to feed the world and cure disease. But we don’t need human cloning. We need a biotech summit, a global ban to strongly discourage cloners from making babies and a halt on further research until debate is concluded and laws are in place. More than 170 nations have no gene laws. Regulation in America is almost useless when you can hop on a plane and implant a clone in an hour elsewhere.
