Cloning: What Hath Genomics Wrought?

Occasionally, a great change in history comes about quickly and without warning, transforming the very way we perceive ourselves and the world around us for generations to come. Such was the case when the world first heard about Dolly the cloned sheep. Now, Ian Wilmut, the Scottish scientist who cloned Dolly, has made history a second time, and the new development is likely to have an even greater impact on the world than the first.

The British patent office has just granted Wilmut’s Roslin Institute patents on his cloning process and all animals cloned using the process. The patents have been licensed to Geron Corp., a California-based biotech company. There is something more, however. The patent also includes as intellectual property--i.e., patented inventions--all cloned human embryos up to the blastocyst stage, which is a cluster of about 140 cells. For the first time, a national government has declared that a specific human being created through the process of cloning is, at its earliest phase of development, to be considered an invention in the eyes of the patent office. The implications are profound and far-reaching.

It was less than 135 years ago that the United States abolished slavery, making it illegal for any human being to own another human being as property after birth. Now the British patent office has opened the door to a new era in which a developing human being can be owned, in the form of intellectual property, in the gestational stages between conception and birth.

Regardless of where people may stand on the question of abortion, one would think that everyone would be shocked at the idea that a company might be able to own a human embryo as an invention.

Parents, when they read about this extraordinary patent decision, should ask themselves whether their children and future generations will be well served ethically if they grow up in a world where they come to think of embryonic human life as intellectual property, controlled by life science companies. What happens to our children’s most basic notions about the distinctions between human life and inanimate objects when the former comes to be regarded by law as mere inventions, simple utilities to be bartered like so many commodities in the commercial arena?

And, if cloned human embryos are, in fact, considered to be human inventions, then what becomes of our notion of God, the creator? What will future generations say when their children ask, where do babies come from? Will they say they are the inventions of scientists and the property of life science companies?

Geron makes the point that it has no intention of cloning a full-birthed human being, but only wants to use cloned human embryos as research tools. Still, this breathtaking patent marks the first commercial step into a brave new world of human reproductive technology and designer babies, where gestational human life becomes subject to ownership and commercial exploitation in ways that challenge our very notions of what it means to be a human being. It is possible that in the not-too-distant future parents will order up their children the way they buy other products, making babies the ultimate shopping experience in a post-modern world.

Geron and the life science companies would argue that without patents they would not have the financial incentives to provide cures to deadly diseases and improve human health. Yet the question arises: What is wrong with an economic system in which advancing the human condition depends on allowing a few commercial enterprises exclusive right to claim cloned human embryos as their intellectual property?

For several years, genomic companies have been engaged in a fierce battle to locate, isolate, define and patent plant, animal and human genes, the raw resources of the coming biotech century. Now, with the British patent office making the first stages of human life a patented invention, a new, even more ominous threshold has been crossed.

Step by step, the groundwork is being laid for redefining the building blocks of life--the genes, the chromosomes, the cells, the organs, the tissues and now cloned human embryos--as private property, exploitable in the biological market place. Where will this journey end?