Monday, February 12, 2001
Baby, It's You! And You, And You...
BY NANCY
GIBBS
Before we assume that the market for human clones consists
mainly of narcissists who think the world deserves more of them
or neo-Nazis who dream of cloning Hitler or crackpots and
mavericks and mischief makers of all kinds, it is worth taking a
tour of the marketplace. We might just meet ourselves there.
Imagine for a moment that your daughter needs a bone-marrow
transplant and no one can provide a match; that your wife's
early menopause has made her infertile; or that your
five-year-old has drowned in a lake and your grief has made it
impossible to get your mind around the fact that he is gone
forever. Would the news then really be so easy to dismiss that
around the world, there are scientists in labs pressing ahead
with plans to duplicate a human being, deploying the same
technology that allowed Scottish scientists to clone Dolly the
sheep four years ago?
All it took was that first headline about the astonishing
ewe, and fertility experts began to hear the questions every
day. Our two-year-old daughter died in a car crash; we saved a
lock of her hair in a baby book. Can you clone her? Why does the
law allow people more freedom to destroy fetuses than to create
them? My husband had cancer and is sterile. Can you help us?
The inquiries are pouring in because some scientists are ever
more willing to say yes, perhaps we can. Last month a well-known
infertility specialist, Panayiotis Zavos of the University of
Kentucky, announced that he and Italian researcher Severino
Antinori, the man who almost seven years ago helped a
62-year-old woman give birth using donor eggs, were forming a
consortium to produce the first human clone. Researchers in
South Korea claim they have already created a cloned human
embryo, though they destroyed it rather than implanting it in a
surrogate mother to develop. Recent cover stories in Wired and
the New York Times Magazine tracked the efforts of the Raelians,
a religious group committed to, among other things, welcoming
the first extraterrestrials when they appear. They intend to
clone the cells of a dead 10-month-old boy whose devastated
parents hope, in effect, to bring him back to life as a newborn.
The Raelians say they have the lab and the scientists, and--most
important, considering the amount of trial and error
involved--they say they have 50 women lined up to act as
surrogates to carry a cloned baby to term.
Given what researchers have learned since Dolly, no one
thinks the mechanics of cloning are very hard: take a donor egg,
suck out the nucleus, and hence the DNA, and fuse it with, say,
a skin cell from the human being copied. Then, with the help of
an electrical current, the reconstituted cell should begin
growing into a genetic duplicate. "It's inevitable that
someone will try and someone will succeed," predicts
Delores Lamb, an infertility expert at Baylor University. The
consensus among biotechnology specialists is that within a few
years--some scientists believe a few months--the news will break
of the birth of the first human clone.
At that moment, at least two things will happen--one private,
one public. The meaning of what it is to be human--which until
now has involved, at the very least, the mysterious melding of
two different people's DNA--will shift forever, along with our
understanding of the relationship between parents and children,
means and ends, ends and beginnings. And as a result, the
conversation that has occupied scientists and ethicists for
years, about how much man should mess with nature when it comes
to reproduction, will drop onto every kitchen table, every
pulpit, every politician's desk. Our fierce national debate over
issues like abortion and euthanasia will seem tame and
transparent compared with the questions that human cloning
raises.
That has many scientists scared to death. Because even if all
these headlines are hype and we are actually far away from
seeing the first human clone, the very fact that at this moment,
the research is proceeding underground, unaccountable, poses a
real threat. The risk lies not just with potential babies born
deformed, as many animal clones are; not just with desperate
couples and cancer patients and other potential
"clients" whose hopes may be raised and hearts broken
and life savings wiped out. The immediate risk is that a
backlash against renegade science might strike at responsible
science as well.
The more scared people are of some of this research,
scientists worry, the less likely they are to tolerate any of
it. Yet variations on cloning technology are already used in
biotechnology labs all across the country. It is these
techniques that will allow, among other things, the creation of
cloned herds of sheep and cows that produce medicines in their
milk. Researchers also hope that one day, the ability to clone
adult human cells will make it possible to "grow" new
hearts and livers and nerve cells.
But some of the same techniques could also be used to grow a
baby. Trying to block one line of research could impede another
and so reduce the chances of finding cures for ailments such as
Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, cancer and heart disease. Were some
shocking breakthrough in human cloning to cause "an
overcompensatory response by legislators," says Rockefeller
University cloning expert Tony Perry, "that could be
disastrous. At some point, it will potentially cost lives."
So we are left with choices and trade-offs and a need to think
through whether it is this technology that alarms us or just
certain ways of using it.
By day, Randolfe Wicker, 63, runs a lighting shop in New York
City. But in his spare time, as spokesman for the Human Cloning
Foundation, he is the face of cloning fervor in the U.S. "I
took one step in this adventure, and it took over me like
quicksand," says Wicker. He is planning to have some of his
skin cells stored for future cloning. "If I'm not cloned
before I die, my estate will be set up so that I can be cloned
after," he says, admitting, however, that he hasn't found a
lawyer willing to help. "It's hard to write a will with all
these uncertainties," he concedes. "A lot of lawyers
will look at me crazy."
As a gay man, Wicker has long been frustrated that he cannot
readily have children of his own; as he gets older, his desire
to reproduce grows stronger. He knows that a clone would not be
a photocopy of him but talks about the traits the boy might
possess: "He will like the color blue, Middle Eastern food
and romantic Spanish music that's out of fashion." And then
he hints at the heart of his motive. "I can thumb my nose
at Mr. Death and say, 'You might get me, but you're not going to
get all of me,'" he says. "The special formula that is
me will live on into another lifetime. It's a partial triumph
over death. I would leave my imprint not in sand but in
cement."
This kind of talk makes ethicists conclude that even people
who think they know about cloning--let alone the rest of
us--don't fully understand its implications. Cloning, notes
ethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania,
"can't make you immortal because clearly the clone is a
different person. If I take twins and shoot one of them, it will
be faint consolation to the dead one that the other one is still
running around, even though they are genetically identical. So
the road to immortality is not through cloning."
Still, cloning is the kind of issue so confounding that you
envy the purists at either end of the argument. For the Roman
Catholic Church, the entire question is one of world view:
whether life is a gift of love or just one more industrial
product, a little more valuable than most. Those who believe
that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception think
it is fine for God to make clones; he does it about 4,000 times
a day, when a fertilized egg splits into identical twins. But
when it comes to massaging a human life, for the scientist to do
mechanically what God does naturally is to interfere with his
work, and no possible benefit can justify that presumption.
On the other end of the argument are the libertarians who
don't like politicians or clerics or ethics boards interfering
with what they believe should be purely individual decisions.
Reproduction is a most fateful lottery; in their view, cloning
allows you to hedge your bet. While grieving parents may be
confused about the technology--cloning, even if it works, is not
resurrection--their motives are their own business. As for
infertile couples, "we are interested in giving people the
gift of life," Zavos, the aspiring cloner, told TIME this
week. "Ethics is a wonderful word, but we need to look
beyond the ethical issues here. It's not an ethical issue. It's
a medical issue. We have a duty here. Some people need this to
complete the life cycle, to reproduce."
In the messy middle are the vast majority of people who view
the prospect with a vague alarm, an uneasy sense that science is
dragging us into dark woods with no paths and no easy way to
turn back. Ian Wilmut, the scientist who cloned Dolly but has
come out publicly against human cloning, was not trying to help
sheep have genetically related children. "He was trying to
help farmers produce genetically improved sheep," notes
Hastings Center ethicist Erik Parens. "And surely that's
how the technology will go with us too." Cloning, Parens
says, "is not simply this isolated technique out there that
a few deluded folks are going to avail themselves of, whether
they think it is a key to immortality or a way to bring someone
back from the dead. It's part of a much bigger project.
Essentially the big-picture question is, To what extent do we
want to go down the path of using reproductive technologies to
genetically shape our children?"
At the moment, the American public is plainly not ready to
move quickly on cloning. In a TIME/CNN poll last week, 90% of
respondents thought it was a bad idea to clone human beings.
"Cloning right now looks like it's coming to us on a magic
carpet, piloted by a cult leader, sold to whoever can afford
it," says ethicist Caplan. "That makes people
nervous."
And it helps explain why so much of the research is being done
secretly. We may learn of the first human clone only months,
even years, after he or she is born--if the event hasn't
happened already, as some scientists speculate. The team that
cloned Dolly waited until she was seven months old to announce
her existence. Creating her took 277 tries, and right up until
her birth, scientists around the world were saying that cloning
a mammal from an adult cell was impossible. "There's a
significant gap between what scientists are willing to talk
about in public and their private aspirations," says
British futurist Patrick Dixon. "The law of genetics is
that the work is always significantly further ahead than the
news. In the digital world, everything is hyped because there
are no moral issues--there is just media excitement. Gene
technology creates so many ethical issues that scientists are
scared stiff of a public reaction if the end results of their
research are known."
Of course, attitudes often change over time. In-vitro
fertilization was effectively illegal in many states 20 years
ago, and the idea of transplanting a heart was once considered
horrifying. Public opinion on cloning will evolve just as it did
on these issues, advocates predict. But in the meantime, the
crusaders are mostly driven underground. Princeton biologist Lee
Silver says fertility specialists have told him that they have
no problem with cloning and would be happy to provide it as a
service to their clients who could afford it. But these same
specialists would never tell inquiring reporters that, Silver
says--it's too hot a topic right now. "I think what's
happened is that all the mainstream doctors have taken a
hands-off approach because of this huge public outcry. But I
think what they are hoping is that some fringe group will
pioneer it and that it will slowly come into the mainstream and
then they will be able to provide it to their patients."
All it will take, some predict, is that first snapshot.
"Once you have a picture of a normal baby with 10 fingers
and 10 toes, that changes everything," says San Mateo,
Calif., attorney and cloning advocate Mark Eibert, who gets
inquiries from infertile couples every day. "Once they put
a child in front of the cameras, they've won." On the other
hand, notes Gregory Pence, a professor of philosophy at the
University of Alabama at Birmingham and author of Who's Afraid
of Human Cloning?, "if the first baby is defective, cloning
will be banned for the next 100 years."
"I wouldn't mind being the first person cloned if it
were free. I don't mind being a guinea pig," says Doug
Dorner, 35. He and his wife Nancy both work in health care.
"We're not afraid of technology," he says. Dorner has
known since he was 16 that he would never be able to have
children the old-fashioned way. A battle with lymphoma left him
sterile, so when he and Nancy started thinking of having
children, he began following the scientific developments in
cloning more closely. The more he read, the more excited he got.
"Technology saved my life when I was 16," he says, but
at the cost of his fertility. "I think technology should
help me have a kid. That's a fair trade."
Talk to the Dorners, and you get a glimpse of choices that
most parents can scarcely imagine having to make. Which parent,
for instance, would they want to clone? Nancy feels she would be
bonded to the child just from carrying him, so why not let the
child have Doug's genetic material? Does it bother her to know
she would, in effect, be raising her husband as a little boy?
"It wouldn't be that different. He already acts like a
five-year-old sometimes," she says with a laugh.
How do they imagine raising a cloned child, given the
knowledge they would have going in? "I'd know exactly what
his basic drives were," says Doug. The boy's dreams and
aspirations, however, would be his own, Doug insists. "I
used to dream of being a fighter pilot," he recalls, a
dream lost when he got cancer. While they are at it, why not
clone Doug twice? "Hmm. Two of the same kid," Doug
ponders. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. But I
know we'd never clone our clone to have a second child. Once you
start copying something, who knows what the next copies will be
like?"
In fact the risks involved with cloning mammals are so great
that Wilmut, the premier cloner, calls it "criminally
irresponsible" for scientists to be experimenting on humans
today. Even after four years of practice with animal cloning,
the failure rate is still overwhelming: 98% of embryos never
implant or die off during gestation or soon after birth. Animals
that survive can be nearly twice as big at birth as is normal,
or have extra-large organs or heart trouble or poor immune
systems. Dolly's "mother" was six years old when she
was cloned. That may explain why Dolly's cells show signs of
being older than they actually are--scientists joked that she
was really a sheep in lamb's clothing. This deviation raises the
possibility that beings created by cloning adults will age
abnormally fast.
"We had a cloned sheep born just before Christmas that was
clearly not normal," says Wilmut. "We hoped for a few
days it would improve and then, out of kindness, we euthanized
it, because it obviously would never be healthy." Wilmut
believes "it is almost a certainty" that cloned human
children would be born with similar maladies. Of course, we
don't euthanize babies. But these kids would probably die very
prematurely anyway. Wilmut pauses to consider the genie he has
released with Dolly and the hopes he has raised. "It seems
such a profound irony," he says, "that in trying to
make a copy of a child who has died tragically, one of the most
likely outcomes is another dead child."
That does not seem to deter the scientists who work on the
Clonaid project run by the Raelian sect. They say they are
willing to try to clone a dead child. Though their outfit is
easy to mock, they may be even further along than the
competition, in part because they have an advantage over other
teams. A formidable obstacle to human cloning is that donor eggs
are a rare commodity, as are potential surrogate mothers, and
the Raelians claim to have a supply of both.
Earlier this month, according to Brigitte Boisselier,
Clonaid's scientific director, somewhere in North America, a
young woman walked into a Clonaid laboratory whose location is
kept secret. Then, in a procedure that has been done thousands
of times, a doctor inserted a probe, removed 15 eggs from the
woman's ovaries and placed them in a chemical soup. Last week
two other Clonaid scientists, according to the group, practiced
the delicate art of removing the genetic material from each of
the woman's eggs. Within the next few weeks, the Raelian
scientific team plans to place another cell next to the
enucleated egg.
This second cell, they say, comes from a 10-month-old boy who
died during surgery. The two cells will be hit with an
electrical charge, according to the scenario, and will fuse,
forming a new hybrid cell that no longer has the genes of the
young woman but now has the genes of the dead child. Once the
single cell has developed into six to eight cells, the next step
is to follow the existing, standard technology of assisted
reproduction: gingerly insert the embryo into a woman's womb and
hope it implants. Clonaid scientists expect to have implanted
the first cloned human embryo in a surrogate mother by next
month.
Even if the technology is basic, and even if it appeals to
some infertile couples, should grieving parents really be
pursuing this route? "It's a sign of our growing despotism
over the next generation," argues University of Chicago
bioethicist Leon Kass. Cloning introduces the possibility of
parents' making choices for their children far more fundamental
than whether to give them piano lessons or straighten their
teeth. "It's not just that parents will have particular
hopes for these children," says Kass. "They will have
expectations based on a life that has already been lived. What a
thing to do--to carry on the life of a person who has
died."
The libertarians are ready with their answers. "I think
we're hypercritical about people's reasons for having
children," says Pence. "If they want to re-create
their dead children, so what?" People have always had
self-serving reasons for having children, he argues, whether to
ensure there's someone to care for them in their old age or to
relive their youth vicariously. Cloning is just another
reproductive tool; the fact that it is not a perfect tool, in
Pence's view, should not mean it should be outlawed altogether.
"We know there are millions of girls who smoke and drink
during pregnancy, and we know what the risks to the fetus are,
but we don't do anything about it," he notes. "If
we're going to regulate cloning, maybe we should regulate that
too."
Olga Tomusyak was two weeks shy of her seventh birthday when
she fell out of the window of her family's apartment. Her
parents could barely speak for a week after she died. "Life
is empty without her," says her mother Tanya, a computer
programmer in Sydney, Australia. "Other parents we have
talked to who have lost children say it will never go
away." Olga's parents cremated the child before thinking of
the cloning option. All that remains are their memories, some
strands of hair and three baby teeth, so they have begun
investigating whether the teeth could yield the nuclei to clone
her one day. While it is theoretically possible to extract DNA
from the teeth, scientists say it is extremely unlikely.
"You can't expect the new baby will be exactly like her.
We know that is not possible," says Tanya. "We think
of the clone as her twin or at least a baby who will look like
her." The parents would consider the new little girl as
much Olga's baby as their own. "Anything that grows from
her will remind us of her," says Tanya. Though she and her
husband are young enough to have other children, for now, this
is the child they want.
Once parents begin to entertain the option of holding on to some
part of a child, why would the reverse not be true?
"Bill" is a guidance counselor in Southern California,
a fortysomething expectant father who has been learning
everything he can about the process of cloning. But it is not a
lost child he is looking to replicate. He is interested in
cloning his mother, who is dying of pancreatic cancer. He has
talked to her husband, his siblings, everyone except her
doctor--and her, for fear that it will make her think they have
given up hope on her. He confides, "We might end up making
a decision without telling her."
His goal is to extract a tissue specimen from his mother
while it's still possible and store it, to await the day
when--if--cloning becomes technically safe and socially
acceptable. Late last week, as his mother's health weakened, the
family began considering bringing up the subject with her
because they need her cooperation to take the sample. Meanwhile,
Bill has already contacted two labs about tissue storage, one as
a backup. "I'm in touch with a couple of different people
who might be doing that," he says, adding that both are in
the U.S. "It seems like a little bit of an underground
movement, you know--people are a little reluctant that if they
announce it, they might be targeted, like the abortion
clinics."
If Bill's hopes were to materialize and the clone were born,
who would that person be? "It wouldn't be my mother but a
person who would be very similar to my mother, with certain
traits. She has a lot of great traits: compassion and
intelligence and looks," he says. And yet, perhaps
inevitably, he talks as though this is a way to rewind and
replay the life of someone he loves. "She really didn't
have the opportunities we had in the baby-boom generation,
because her parents experienced the Depression and the
war," he says. "So the feeling is that maybe we could
give her some opportunities that she didn't have. It would be
sort of like we're taking care of her now. You know how when
your parents age and everything shifts, you start taking care of
them? Well, this would be an extension of that."
A world in which cloning is commonplace confounds every human
relationship, often in ways most potential clients haven't
considered. For instance, if a woman gives birth to her own
clone, is the child her daughter or her sister? Or, says
bioethicist Kass, "let's say the child grows up to be the
spitting image of its mother. What impact will that have on the
relationship between the father and his child if that child
looks exactly like the woman he fell in love with?" Or, he
continues, "let's say the parents have a cloned son and
then get divorced. How will the mother feel about seeing a copy
of the person she hates most in the world every day? Everyone
thinks about cloning from the point of view of the parents. No
one looks at it from the point of view of the clone."
If infertile couples avoid the complications of choosing
which of them to clone and instead look elsewhere for their DNA,
what sorts of values govern that choice? Do they pick an uncle
because he's musical, a willing neighbor because she's
brilliant? Through that door lies the whole unsettling debate
about designer babies, fueled already by the commercial sperm
banks that promise genius DNA to prospective parents. Sperm
banks give you a shot at passing along certain traits; cloning
all but assures it.
Whatever the moral quandaries, the one-stop-shopping aspect
of cloning is a plus to many gay couples. Lesbians would have
the chance to give birth with no male involved at all; one woman
could contribute the ovum, the other the DNA. Christine DeShazo
and her partner Michele Thomas of Miramar, Fla., have been in
touch with Zavos about producing a baby this way. Because they
have already been ostracized as homosexuals, they aren't worried
about the added social sting that would come with cloning.
"Now [people] would say, 'Not only are you a lesbian, you
are a cloning lesbian,'" says Thomas. As for potential
health problems, "I would love our baby if its hand was
attached to its head," she says. DeShazo adds, "If it
came out green, I would love it. Our little alien..."
Just as women have long been able to have children without a
male sexual partner, through artificial insemination, men could
potentially become dads alone: replace the DNA from a donor egg
with one's own and then recruit a surrogate mother to carry the
child. Some gay-rights advocates even argue that should sexual
preference prove to have a biological basis, and should genetic
screening lead to terminations of gay embryos, homosexuals would
have an obligation to produce gay children through cloning.
All sorts of people might be attracted to the idea of the
ultimate experiment in single parenthood. Jack Barker, a
marketing specialist for a corporate-relocation company in
Minneapolis, is 36 and happily unmarried. "I've come to the
conclusion that I don't need a partner but can still have a
child," he says. "And a clone would be the perfect
child to have because I know exactly what I'm getting." He
understands that the child would not be a copy of him.
"We'd be genetically identical," says Barker.
"But he wouldn't be raised by my parents--he'd be raised by
me." Cloning, he hopes, might even let him improve on the
original: "I have bad allergies and asthma. It would be
nice to have a kid like you but with those improvements."
Cloning advocates view the possibilities as a kind of liberation
from travails assumed to be part of life: the danger that your
baby will be born with a disease that will kill him or her, the
risk that you may one day need a replacement organ and die
waiting for it, the helplessness you feel when confronted with
unbearable loss. The challenge facing cloning pioneers is to
make the case convincingly that the technology itself is not
immoral, however immorally it could be used.
One obvious way is to point to the broader benefits. Thus
cloning proponents like to attach themselves to the whole arena
of stem-cell research, the brave new world of inquiry into how
the wonderfully pliable cells of seven-day-old embryos behave.
Embryonic stem cells eventually turn into every kind of tissue,
including brain, muscle, nerve and blood. If scientists could
harness their powers, these cells could serve as the body's
self-repair kit, providing cures for Parkinson's, diabetes,
Alzheimer's and paralysis. Actors Christopher Reeve, paralyzed
by a fall from a horse, and Michael J. Fox, who suffers from
Parkinson's, are among those who have pushed Congress to
overturn the government's restrictions on federal funding of
embryonic-stem-cell research.
But if the cloners want to climb on this train in hopes of
riding it to a public relations victory, the mainstream
scientists want to push them off. Because researchers see the
potential benefits of understanding embryonic stem cells as
immense, they are intent on avoiding controversy over their use.
Being linked with the human-cloning activists is their
nightmare. Says Michael West, president of Massachusetts-based
Advanced Cell Technology, a biotech company that uses cloning
technology to develop human medicines: "We're really
concerned that if someone goes off and clones a Raelian, there
could be an overreaction to this craziness--especially by
regulators and Congress. We're desperately concerned--and it's a
bad metaphor--about throwing the baby out with the bath
water."
Scientists at ACT are leery of revealing too much about their
animal-cloning research, much less their work on human embryos.
"What we're doing is the first step toward cloning a human
being, but we're not cloning a human being," says West.
"The miracle of cloning isn't what people think it is.
Cloning allows you to make a genetically identical copy of an
animal, yes, but in the eyes of a biologist, the real miracle is
seeing a skin cell being put back into the egg cell, taking it
back in time to when it was an undifferentiated cell, which then
can turn into any cell in the body." Which means that new,
pristine tissue could be grown in labs to replace damaged or
diseased parts of the body. And since these replacement parts
would be produced using skin or other cells from the suffering
patient, there would be no risk of rejection. "That means
you've solved the age-old problem of transplantation," says
West. "It's huge."
So far, the main source of embryonic stem cells is
"leftover" embryos from IVF clinics; cloning embryos
could provide an almost unlimited source. Progress could come
even faster if Congress were to lift the restrictions on federal
funding--which might have the added safety benefit of the
federal oversight that comes with federal dollars. "We're
concerned about George W.'s position and whether he'll let
existing guidelines stay in place," says West. "People
are begging to work on those cells."
That impulse is enough to put the Roman Catholic Church in
full revolt; the Vatican has long condemned any research that
involves creating and experimenting with human embryos, the vast
majority of which inevitably perish. The church believes that
the soul is created at the moment of conception, and that the
embryo is worthy of protection. It reportedly took 104 attempts
before the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, was born; cloning Dolly
took more than twice that. Imagine, say opponents, how many
embryos would be lost in the effort to clone a human. This loss
is mass murder, says David Byers, director of the National
Conference of Catholic Bishops' commission on science and human
values. "Each of the embryos is a human being simply by
dint of its genetic makeup."
Last week 160 bishops and five Cardinals met for three days
behind closed doors in Irving, Texas, to wrestle with the issues
biotechnology presents. But the cloning debate does not break
cleanly even along religious lines. "Rebecca," a
thirtysomething San Francisco Bay Area resident, spent seven
years trying to conceive a child with her husband. Having
"been to hell and back" with IVF treatment, Rebecca is
now as thoroughly committed to cloning as she is to
Christianity. "It's in the Bible--be fruitful and
multiply," she says. "People say, 'You're playing
God.' But we're not. We're using the raw materials the good Lord
gave us. What does the doctor do when the heart has stopped?
They have to do direct massage of the heart. You could say the
doctor is playing God. But we save a life. With human cloning,
we're not so much saving a life as creating a new being by
manipulation of the raw materials, DNA, the blueprint for life.
You're simply using it in a more creative manner."
A field where emotions run so strong and hope runs so deep is
fertile ground for profiteers and charlatans. In her effort to
clone her daughter Olga, Tanya Tomusyak contacted an Australian
firm, Southern Cross Genetics, which was founded three years ago
by entrepreneur Graeme Sloan to preserve DNA for future cloning.
In an e-mail, Sloan told the parents that Olga's teeth would
provide more than enough DNA--even though that possibility is
remote. "All DNA samples are placed into
computer-controlled liquid-nitrogen tanks for long-term
storage," he wrote. "The cost of doing a DNA
fingerprint and genetic profile and placing the sample into
storage would be $2,500. Please note that all of our fees are in
U.S. dollars."
When contacted by TIME, Sloan admitted, "I don't have a
scientific background. I'm pure business. I'd be lying if I said
I wasn't here to make a dollar out of it. But I would like to
see organ cloning become a reality." He was inspired to
launch the business, he says, after a young cousin died of
leukemia. "There's megadollars involved, and everyone is
racing to be the first," he says. As for his own slice of
the pie, Sloan says he just sold his firm to a French company,
which he refuses to name, and he was heading for Hawaii last
week. The Southern Cross factory address turns out to be his
mother's house, and his "office" phone is answered by
a man claiming to be his brother David--although his mother says
she has no son by that name.
The more such peddlers proliferate, the more politicians will
be tempted to invoke prohibitions. Four states--California,
Louisiana, Michigan and Rhode Island--have already banned human
cloning, and this spring Texas may become the fifth. Republican
state senator Jane Nelson has introduced a bill in Austin that
would impose a fine of as much as $1 million for researchers who
use cloning technology to initiate pregnancy in humans. The
proposed Texas law would permit embryonic-stem-cell research,
but bills proposed in other states were so broadly written that
they could have stopped those activities too.
"The short answer to the cloning question," says
ethicist Caplan, "is that anybody who clones somebody today
should be arrested. It would be barbaric human experimentation.
It would be killing fetuses and embryos for no purpose, none,
except for curiosity. But if you can't agree that that's wrong
to do, and if the media can't agree to condemn rather than gawk,
that's a condemnation of us all."
Chat with Michael Lemonick on America Online at 7 p.m. E.T.
Wednesday. Keyword: Live
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