Clones: Will There Be
“Carbon Copy” People?
By EMILY and PER OLA D’AULAIRE
Take a
cell, practically any cell, from your body, theory goes, and through
appropriate biological tinkering you can cause it to grow into a duplicate of
yourself—identical from eyelashes to toenails.
Science
fact or science fiction? In the spring
of 1978, a book was published telling the supposedly true story of an elderly
millionaire who, at great expense, succeeded in producing a clone—an exact
genetic copy of himself. According to
the account, the clonal offspring, now three years old, is living with his
“father” in California.
The book
caused a small uproar. Clone movies and
clone jokes sprang up overnight. A
group of scientists demanded that the federal government disclose all the
studies it has funded on cloning and the related area of cell biology. In May of 1978, Representative Paul Rogers
[D., Fla.] chairman of the House Subcommittee on Health and Environment,
convinced hearing on the subject. The
author was conveniently unable to appear.
But some distinguished biological researchers, including
ClementL.Markert of Yale University and Beatrice mintz of Fox Chase Institute
for Cancer Research, offered their opinion that the book was pure fantasy, a
hoax. They pointed out that cell
researchers simply do not yet know enough to bring off such a feat, even if
they wanted to.
Yet the
cloning story touched highly sensitive nerve.
People began to realize that we are on the threshold of a new era in the
biosciences. Said Liebe Cavalieri, a
molecular biologist at New York’s Sloan-Kettering Cancer research Institute,
“Knowledge of genetic engineering in emerging that allows scientists to tinker
with, and change, the very stuff of life.”
Ironically,
cloning—asexual reproduction that results in exact genetic duplicates of the
original—is, to many of earth’s life forms, both harmless and natural. When the blob-like amoeba reproduces by
splitting into two parts, for example it is essentially cloning itself. Both halves contain the same genetic
blueprints; they are exactly alike.
The term
derives from the Greek work ‘klon’, twig offshoot, and the technique has been
used for years to propagate plants. By
placing a cutting from a twig of stem in water until roots appear, then moving
it to soil, horticulturists can produce a tree of flower identical to the
donor. In short, a clone. More recently, single cells have been taken
from carrots—clones of the original—bypassing the need for seeds and
guaranteeing an identical plant every time.
At the
very earliest stage, people too are clones—clones of the fertilized egg. Egg and sperm merge at conception to form a
single cell, which like the amoeba will divide into 2,4,8, then growing cluster
of individual cells—each containing the identical genetic code of the original
cell. However, as the cells continue to
divide and grow into an embryo, they begin to specialize, have differentiated,
into the many parts that make up a human being. Only the needed part of the code remains active; the rest is somehow
mysteriously switched off. The
presumption on which human cloning rests is that all these cells, though now
specialized, still contain exact copies of the original set of genetic
instructions needed to make an entire individual—and could do so if a way is
found to switch them back on.
If so,
the recipe for cloning people should be quiet simple—at least in theory. Here’s how it would work; shortly after
ovulation, an egg is removed from a woman’s Fallopian tube. The cell nucleus, the part containing the
woman’s contribution to the new individual, is plucked out, leaving a
genetically blank state. Next a single
cell is obtained from a donor [male of female]—scraped from, say, the skin. It will have in its nucleus the entire line
of coded instructions for assembling a new person, though only the instructions
for ‘skin’ may presently be operative.
But once the nucleus is transplanted into the enucleated egg, the
cytoplasm—material surrounding the nucleus—should trigger the whole code into
action.
When the
egg cell has divided a few times, it is placed into the womb of a healthy woman
[not necessarily the one from the egg was taken], and incubated. Nine months later a genetic duplicate of the
cell donor is born—same sex, same physical and mental potentials. The donor and the baby clone are, in effect,
identical twins, differing only in age.
Although
it may look easy on paper, it isn’t in practice. To date the only authenticated successful cloning experiments
using, this method have been on frogs—using cells taken from tadpoles
[equivalent in development to human embryos].
This suggests that the experiments worked only because the cells were
not yet fully specialized. Said Professor
Markert, “It is possible that once a cell has fully specialized, it is irreversibly
changed. If so, adult human cloning may
never be possible”.
If the
only flesh-and-blood clones are a few laboratory frogs why, then, all the
fuss? “Because,” said Jeremy Rifkin,
co-director of a public-interest lobbying group and co-author of the book ‘Who
Should Play God?’, “the potential for human cloning, no matter how far in the
future, challenges our entire value system.
We must talk about the implications now, before any crisis occurs,”
What
would happen if human cloning became a reality? One favorite scenario is the creation of a new breed of
Hitlers—or Einsteins. Scientists
quickly disclaim the possibility. “It
is more than genetic makeup that makes an individual,” says Markert. “We are all products of a particular
historical era and of a special environment, with so many minute things
affecting the way we develop each and every day, even in the womb, that a
duplicate background—and therefore a duplicate individual—could never be
created.”
What
would happen to the family, opponents of genetic engineering ask, if the day
comes when infants no longer owe their existence to two biological
parents? Markert does not see this as a
problem either. “Most men and woman
want their child to be an expression of them both. Even if the practice were ever possible, there just wouldn’t be a
big demand for it.”
But
demand or not, there is no denying the serious moral issues raised by the
possibility of human cloning. As
Representative Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) stated, “The question is not can new
life survive outside the laboratory, but can our traditional values survive
within it?”
The U.S.
Court of Customs and Patent Appeals ruled in 1978 that any corporation that
creates a new form of life in the laboratory—in the particular case, an “oil
eating” bacteria for cleaning up oil spills—can patent it. Does this mean that whoever is first to
clone a human can patent the process?
And is a clone then a possession, a product? What would be its legal rights?
Could you keep it on hand like a robot, to do the dishes or go to the
office—maybe even use it for spare parts?
Some of
these dilemmas could be solved by legally defining a clone as a human,
according it all the same rights and protections. Even so, questions of attitude and acceptance remain. Wouldn’t a clone, though a human in every
legal and biological sense of the word, always be considered “different”? What would such an attitude do to the
clone? Would the uncertain status make
him or her, though physically perfect, a psychological cripple, unable to
function in our society? What
then? Do we discard, like faulty
merchandise, this life we have created?
There are, of course, no easy answers.
With so
many potentials problems, perhaps cloning research should be banned. “But this is not a theneque developed for
reproductive purposes,” argued Robert G. McConnell, professor of genetics and
cell biology at the University of Minnesota.
“It is a tool for achieving a new understanding of biology at the most fundamental
level,” adds Beatrice Mintz, “our objective is not to try to clone a human
being, but to cure human disease.”
Already
biologists studying the cell’s inner workings and the various methods of
cloning have made discoveries that may ultimately led to breakthroughs in the
fight against cancer, control of the aging process, and the conquest of more
than 100 presently incurable human genetic diseases. Cloning may also bring
about new strains of livestock. At
Yale, for example, Markert is working toward the cloning of such animals as
cattle and pigs.
“The
potential benefits are enormous,” he said. “You could take cows lime Holsteins
that produce a lot of milk and cross them with cattle are hardly in the
tropics. When you get a superior animal
with the best qualities of both, you clone it.
And you could have a new, precisely engineered strain of cattle—a boon
to many third-world nations—within two of three years, rather than centuries,
as with selective breeding.”
To
restrict cloning-related research would mean closing the door on an important
area of knowledge. To continue to probe
the secrets of the cell, however, it perhaps to uncover the secret of human
cloning. And, given a nature of man, if
it can be done it will be done. What
then is the answer?
Said
Congressman Rogers: “It is clear that human cloning is not yet possible. The day when it will be—if ever—is far
off. For now, at least, the benefits of
cell-biology research outweigh the risks.”
In sum, the horse may never get out of the
stable. In fact there may not be a
horse in there in the first place. But
we should keep an eye on the barn door anyway.
As Rogers put it, ‘One can always be surprised.”
