1/25/98
Ground the cloning debate in science, not emotion  
  
     When I think about cloning, I think about twins. Identical twins, but born at different times; a phenomenon not previously encountered by humanity, to be sure, but just one among many other 20th-century innovations in human reproduction. 
     Clearly I am missing something _ an enzyme, perhaps, or whatever it is that causes people to recoil in visceral horror at the very idea. 
     I just wanted to learn more about how it works, and I have, in Gina Kolata's book Clone: The Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead. 
     Kolata is the New York Times science reporter who broke the Dolly story in the American press. Speaking to the Denver Press Club Wednesday, she said she seldom encounters people who are repulsed. Instead, she said, her audiences find the story unbelievably fascinating. 
     Dolly was front-page news because she is, as Kolat  phrased it, ``proof of concept.'' Many scientists had confidently proclaimed that cloning from an adult cell, one that had differentiated into a particular kind of tissue, was and always would be biologically impossible. 
     Not so. The cell that grew into Dolly was from the udder of a sheep that had probably been turned into mutton years before the lamb was born. And the cell was't chosen for any profound scientific reason, it was just something handy in the researchers' freezer. 
     Growing a cell into a whole animal is a delicate process. The cell is put into an unfertilized egg, the egg is treated so it will do whatever it is that eggs do to start embryonic development, the embryo is implanted in a surrogate mother. All those things had been done before Dolly, as part of research into human infertility or the production of drugs in genetically engineered animals. 
     Is the possibility that humans would be cloned so alarming that all such research must be ended? I don't see why. 
     Human cloning wouldn't happen wholesale. The traditional way of creating a human embryo is inexpensive, and popular for other reasons. There are some plausible worries about cloning, but the prospect that the entire human race would abandon sex in order to shop at genetic boutiques is not one of them. 
     Cloning would have to be almost universal before the human species was in any danger of losing its genetic diversity, and maybe not even then. If everybody in the world chose to have one cloned child, that next generation would be exactly as diverse as this one. 
     And if an eccentric billionaire or a megalomaniac dictator tried to clone an army? Well, it wouldn't work, for one thing. The children would grow up as individuals, just as twins do. 
     I would expect a clone daughter, if I were raising one, to resemble me. She'd look like me, she'd probably be good at math and dreadful at sports, but she wouldn't be me. I was born in 1939, into an America that no longer exists, and raised by parents themselves now dead. She would be a different person. 
     If mass cloning is an abuse, then it could be banned. But it is not necessary to deny a potentially beneficial treatment to everyone in order to prevent a few people from abusing it. 
     You may have read that it took 277 attempts to produce Dolly, but that's misleading. Researchers started with 277 udder cells, of which 13 developed into embryos. Most of those failed to establish pregnancies. 
     Cells are not sacred, and if your moral hackles begin to rise at the thought of creating and then discarding human embryos, that already happens with in vitro fertilization. Cloning does not make it worse. 
     Since Dolly's birth, there have been several improvements in technique, Kolata said, and it's possible that the success rate of these artificial pregnancies could come to exceed the natural rate. 
     Other therapies may solve ethical problems, rather than creating them. Some Parkinson's patients have been treated with tissue harvested from the brains of aborted fetuses, which is a pretty grisly idea. If tissue from genetically engineered cow fetuses could be used instead, that's an improvement. Is it wrong to grow bone marrow for cancer patients, or skin for burn victims? If we knew how, would it be immmoral to grant our children genetic resistance to Alzheimer's or AIDS? 
     Those were theoretical questions. Since Dolly's birth, they are practical ones.