NewsMax.com Wires
Saturday, Jan. 6, 2001

Such a scenario has struck imagination and fear into the debate on human cloning, sparked after Dolly the lamb was cloned from an adult sheep in 1997.

But reproductive experts and bioethicists now agree that it is unlikely that an army of clones will be created. It is more likely, some say, that cloning will be used by infertile couples wanting to create a genetically related child or those wishing to clone a lost loved one.

They say the technology already exists to clone a human, and somewhere in the world right now, someone probably is doing just that, if he or she hasn't already done it.

That's the contention of an article in the February issue of Wired magazine, which will hit the newsstands on Thursday.

"If cloning has not happened already, it's going to happen very soon, and the world ought to get over it," said Brian Alexander, author of the article "(You)2" [You squared].

Alexander told United Press International that his original feeling that cloning might be freakish and scary was dispelled during his interviews with experts in human in vitro fertilization and animal reproduction. Armies of drones won't come into being, he said, because while clones will carry the same genetic makeup as their parents, they will be different in their behavior and preferences.

"You could clone Michael Jordan and get tall people, but the clones may not like basketball or even be able to play," he said.

Because of the heated moral and ethical debates on human cloning, work on the first human clone likely will remain secret, Alexander contends. Indeed, his article also takes us into the vast underground of anonymous scientists, religious sects and Web sites that support human cloning.

Alexander interviewed a molecular biologist in the United States who wants to be the first person to create a human clone. He also interviewed a potential client, a businessman living in Western Europe who lost his son to disease more than a year ago, but who kept tissues from the body.

Replacing a Son

The plan is for the scientist and father to fly to an in vitro fertilization lab in Asia, where the lab's director could potentially take out the nuclei of eggs obtained from anonymous donors and inject the son's cells into the eggs to make embryos. Those embryos would be implanted into five to 10 surrogate mothers in the hope that one of the eggs would develop into a clone of the client's son.

This is all technically possible, although money and experimentation so far have kept it from happening, Alexander said. There are very few regulations on in vitro fertilization. Only a few countries in the world, including Japan and some European nations but not the United States, have banned human cloning.

Another group claiming to be working on the first human clone is the Raelians, a "new age" religious group in Quebec that has announced a human cloning project called Clonaid. Last year the sect said it had found an American couple willing to pay $500,000 to clone their dead baby.

This kind of talk remains spine-chilling to many people. But Alexander contends that such "under-the-radar pro-cloning agitation" is converging with falling taboos and scientific advances such as DNA microarrays that can more accurately isolate viable cloned embryos.

"Human cloning could be done tomorrow," he quotes Alan Trounson, an animal cloner and in vitro fertilization clinician at Australia's Monash University, as saying.

"All the pieces are out there to do it, so why wouldn't someone do it by now?" Michael Bishop, president of cattle cloning company Infigen Inc. of DeForest, Wis., told UPI.

"I think the public is becoming more comfortable with the idea of cloning. They are not gasping for air the way they used to with Dolly."

Author Alexander likens the feelings about human cloning to the horrified and concerned reactions in 1978 to Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, who was born in Britain.

And he points out in his article that the subject of human cloning is no longer so taboo. Noted scientists, philosophers and authors, including biologist Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University and novelist Kurt Vonnegut, have signed the "Declaration in Defense of Cloning and the Integrity of Scientific Research," a document supporting reasoned argument on cloning. And Rabbi Michael Broyde of Emery University in Atlanta wrote an article in the journal Jewish Law about the possible place of cloning in Jewish tradition.

With discussions of human cloning becoming more open, there are even some cracks in the ethical wall that has protected use of human embryos, according to bioethicist George Annas, professor of health law at the Boston University School of Public Health. Annas does object to human cloning, but agrees with a recent ruling by Britain's parliament, which in December approved laws to allow medical research to be conducted using stem cells derived from human embryos.

But Annas draws the line at letting those cloned embryos be grown into human beings.

"I don't know why anybody would want to clone a human," Annas told UPI. "The cloned child will be compared to the original child, and this will be psychologically damaging."

Cloning technology does have potential value in genetic engineering, or improving attributes of a person to make him smarter or taller, Annas said, but he objects to that as well. Bishop, of Infigen, noted that genetic engineering was not allowed in feed animals.

One thing supporters and detractors of human cloning do agree on is that only a small number of people will even consider cloning, and they most likely will be parents with a deceased child or infertile or homosexuals who want a genetically related child. In addition, there probably will be people who will try to abuse cloning technology.

"If cloning were made legal tomorrow, it would only appeal to a small minority of people," said author Alexander. "And there probably will be abuses. Someone will always want to breed the perfect left-handed relief pitcher."

Copyright 2000 by United Press International. All rights reserved.