The fantasy and reality of human cloning

There are no doubt significant medical benefits that may result from cloning research, but such technology could also cause massive social disruption and even pure evil.

SO bizarre and yet blatant is the story that most science fiction writers would simply reject it. A young American couple, parents of two other healthy children, lost their 10-month old son after a minor signal operation was botched. The parents suffered more than deep grief and bitter resentment; they also felt convinced that this baby could not be denied to them. And so they preserved some cells of their child from an operation performed a few weeks before his death. They believed that somehow they co uld recreate their son, that is, clone him, and make another child not just in his image but with his genotype.

And this, in fact, is what is being attempted now. Thanks (inevitably) to the Internet, the couple came into contact with an extraordinary company run for profit by an even more extraordinary Canadian sect of Raelians. This sect believes that life on ear th was created scientifically in laboratories by extra-terrestrial beings, and with the help of a group of investors has set up a company named Valiant Venture Limited. The company offers a service called Clonaid, which offers assistance to would-be pare nts willing to have a child cloned from any one of them.

The parents of the dead baby, now substantially enriched by the proceeds of a malpractice suit against the hospital in which their son died, have engaged the company's services at the cost of several million dollars, to reproduce the infant.

All this may sound like a send-up, but it is truly happening and, in all probability, proliferating. The website for the company declares:

"This service offers a fantastic opportunity to parents with fertility problems or homosexual couples to have a child cloned from one of them. The Bahamas-based company plans to build a laboratory in a country where human cloning is not illegal and will offer its services to wealthy parents worldwide. In a first phase, CLONAID. will subcontract existing laboratories to perform the cloning. The company may also sponsor American laboratories working on human cloning and whose government subsidies have bee n cut...

CLONAID. will charge as low as $200,000 US for its cloning services. CLONAID. will also offer a service called INSURACLONE. which, for a $50,000 fee, will provide the sampling and safe storage of cells from a living child or from a beloved person in orde r to create a clone if the child dies of an incurable disease or through an accident. In the case of a genetic disease, the cells will be preserved until science can genetically repair it before recreating the child (or an adult)."

It may be that chances of success in this particular attempt are not so high. After all, even animal cloning is not only fraught with risks but has a notoriously high failure rate. Cloning mammals typically requires hundreds of attempts both to create an embryo and then to implant it successfully, and even then a large number of such cloned animals die quickly because of birth deformities and other problems. But the Raelian sect already has 50 young female followers eagerly volunteering as egg donors an d surrogate mothers, in case the first or subsequent attempts fail.

Indeed, scientists argue that human cloning itself is no longer a particularly complicated or difficult procedure. This makes it quite likely that, even if this weird and profit-motivated attempt by the Raelian company fails, within the next couple of ye ars someone somewhere with access to donor eggs, surrogate mothers and a decent laboratory, will manage to clone a human being successfully.

It is surprising to realise that this is also legally quite possible in much of the world. Although Japan and many European countries have banned human cloning, only three states in the United States have done so, and the Clinton government simply put a three-year moratorium on the use of federal funds for such research, without any bans. In the United Kingdom, recent legislation has formally allowed for such a possibility, on the grounds of the requirements of medical research and scientific advance.

CERTAINLY there are significant medical benefits that may result from cloning research. Cloning of particular tissue is now believed to be a possible cure for diseases like Parkinson's, and there is a wide range of other positive medical results. But eve n apart from this, there are those who see it as a natural extension of assisted reproductive technology, which has become increasingly sophisticated and advanced in a number of countries. From this point of view, cloning is not very different from, or e ven technologically more demanding than, the creation of "designer babies" in which certain genes have been deliberately suppressed or modified.

Thus, consider the arguments of Lee Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton, who has cheerfully predicted that parents will one day be able to choose for their children genes that increase athletic ability, genes that increase musical talents and ulti mately, or genes that affect cognitive abilities.

"Why shouldn't parents be able to give their child something that other children already have?" From this is it not even a small step towards suggesting, as did Barbara Ehrenreich, "why not make a few back-up copies of the embryo and keep a few in the fr eezer in case Junior needs a new kidney or cornea?"

What is alarming is how much of this is happening without the knowledge of society at large, much less with the tacit approval or a discussion of the issues involved. Much of the genetic research that is going on today is not veiled in secrecy so much as it is sanguinely proceeding without reference to any need to inform society. Even the possibility of creating Dolly, the cloned sheep that started the current round of such activity, became known to the world only several months after it came into exist ence. Patrick Dixon, a scientist who has been prominent in opposing cloning research, argues that "when it comes to cloning of mammals there has been a deliberate conspiracy of silence. At the very moment of such protestations, advanced experiments of va rying kinds were already taking place in utmost secrecy."

INTERESTING, too, is the extent to which such public debate as there has been has focussed less on the darker side of these practices, in particular on eugenics, and more on other intractable but somehow cosier problems. Thus, what would happen if a woma n cloned her father and bore him as her son? What is the status of cloned individuals - are they the same as others? What about a possible black market for embryos, and the possibility of "gene theft" as people choose to clone others by saving some of th eir cells?

Indeed, the philosophical and psychological issues thrown up by the very real possibility of human cloning are as mind-boggling as they are fascinating. The analyst Adam Phillips posed the question: is cloning the death or the apotheosis of individualism ? He suggests that "in one fell swoop cloning is a cure for sexuality and difference... the art of self-cloning is an attempt to stop time by killing desire."

But there is of course a darker side. And this darker side is the same as was revealed at various points throughout the previous century and is now most evident in the attempts at genetic manipulation of future humans in other ways as well. Cloning could easily turn into an extreme manifestation of the eugenic desire to "improve" the human race, or the megalomaniac desire to reproduce oneself, or the totalitarian desire to create humans who can be controlled.

It is true, of course, that the advance of technology constantly forces us to rethink the norms and ethical principles on which societies are based. But equally, as technology advances well beyond the awareness and even the imagination of ordinary people , its capacity not only for beneficial progress but also for massive social disruption and even pure evil, cannot be underestimated.