The announcement by Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute
in Scotland
that an adult sheep has been successfully cloned had a tremendous impact
on
the media and the way we view our own posterity. For a couple of reasons,
however, it seems to have had surprisingly little impact in cyberspace.
Firstly, the issue is still very new, and cropped up unexpectedly.
Although making clones from embryos was considered feasible, making
them from
adults was not because as animals mature, our cells begin to specialise.
Mammary
cells may be great for making milk, but scientists did not believe
they could
be used as the basis for making an entire animal until Wilmut came
along and did it.
For an adult cell to be cloned, it must somehow be made
young' again.
This is the stumbling block that many thought would never be overcome,
New
Scientist explains in its special report on cloning at www.newscientist.com/clone/.
Secondly, while most of us may be fascinated (or appalled)
by the prospects
of human cloning, biotechnology's greatest benefits and horrors are
likely to arise from manipulating the genetic code, not simply copying
it.
Indeed, scientists value the new cloning technique largely because
it will
make it easier to duplicate animals whose DNA has already been tinkered
with.
In fact, the main business of PPL Therapeutics, the Scottish
biotech firm
which owns the patent for Wilmut's cloning technique, is to create
transgenic
animals that produce useful proteins. It has a very minimal website
at
<www.webscot.com/sba/ppl.html>.
The Roslin Institute's site at <www.ri.bbsrc.ac.uk>
has more information.
Nevertheless, there is some pretty intense debate going
on in the furthest
corners of the Internet, particularly in Usenet discussion groups.
But for an introduction to the issue, you're best off first paying
a visit to
the New Scientist site, which also contains a lively bio-ethics discussion
forum.
Some of the most interesting comments are those which discuss
how
cloning can be used on animals. Just think, you may eventually be able
to live
with your pets (or rather their twins) your entire life. Or, we may
be able someday to
ressurect extinct species a la Jurassic Park.
As for humans, even Wilmut doesn't seem to think there's
any good reason for
us to clone ourselves, although he does believe the technique will
provide
benefits through speedier drug development and more organ transplants.
An
interesting interview of the now-famous scientist can be found at
<www.salonmagazine.com/feb97/news/news2970224.html>.
But not everyone thinks that cloning humans is such a bad
idea. Nature does
it frequently [in the form of identical twins], says C J Cherryh, a
science
fiction writer who has her own website at <www.cherryh.com>. I find
it easier
to enumerate the handful of areas in which I do not think human cloning
would
be ethical and view the rest as perfectly reasonable.
Indeed, to understand the ramifications of cloning, you're
probably better off
reading science fiction than browsing the web. Cherryh's Cyteen, Ira
Levin's
The Boys From Brazil, about a group of Hitler clones, and Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World, all explore the possible uses of human cloning. (There
is
an interesting Huxley site called Soma Web at
<www.primenet.com/(tilde)matthew/huxmain.html>).
The most visionary views, along no doubt with some crackpot
ideas,
can be found on Usenet. There is a trippy discussion going on in the
sci.bio.cryonics newsgroup about how to create immortality: Do you
grow your
clone and then simply replace his/her/its brain with yours, or should
you grow a
brainless clone and simply insert yours when ready? The talk on sci.bio.technology
is a bit more mundane, although there seems to be some disagreement
about
whether recreating the dead is possible.
What is eminently clear, however, is that not only do some
people believe it's
ethical to clone humans, some even think it's righteous. In other words,
the
genie is out of the bottle, folks, and he ain't goin' back in again.
It's probably
only a matter of time before some human somewhere is cloned.
Who will it be? My guess is it won't be some megalomaniac
like Saddam, some
awesome athlete like Michael Jordan, or some brilliant mind like Steven
Hawking.
Rather, it will probably be some completely banal figure, an actor
or politician who
has enough money to go on a massive ego trip. Either that, or some
scientist may
simply decide to clone himself.
Another Pandora's Box has been opened, and as Wilmut himself
concludes:
History shows that people are very bad at predicting the way that technology
will be used.