Before Antinori could secure his place in infamy, members of the Raelian sect announced the birth of “Eve,” an alleged clone of her 31-year-old American mother, on Dec. 27 (following story). The outrage reached a new climax. President George W. Bush was “deeply troubled.” A Vatican spokesman called the event “an expression of a brutal mentality, lacking all ethical and human consideration.” Even Antinori, of all people, went on the attack. “These claims give science a bad name,” he told Reuters. “There is nothing credible about them. [The Raelians] are not even scientists. I have 200 published medical studies–what do they have?”
By the end of last week, it began to appear they might not have a clone baby. The Raelians, citing the mother’s reluctance to submit herself and her baby to DNA testing, were backing off on their promise to furnish proof. Then they announced another salvo in their publicity campaign: a second baby cloned from an unidentified Dutch lesbian. Meanwhile, Antinori’s deadline of Jan. 1 came and went without a word. Where’s the baby? And where, for that matter, are the other clone babies Antinori has promised over the past year? At a press conference in April, he asserted that three of his patients were pregnant with cloned embryos. One had even passed the first trimester, he claimed, and should have been due in November. Antinori won’t comment on the fate of his patients, invoking the need for “privacy.”
How seriously should we take the cloning brouhaha? Not very. For one thing, cloning is far more difficult than you’d think from listening to the Raelians or reading the tabloids. And even if there is something to these claims, human cloning is more of a symbolic act than a true reproductive alternative, and it’s likely to remain so for some time. “Cloning is a freak show,” says bioethicist Arthur Caplan at the University of Pennsylvania. “It makes great headlines and sells a lot of magazines and TV time. But I don’t think anyone knows what anybody is talking about.”
The biggest threat by far is not cloning so much as the fear of cloning. The Raelians’ claim has ratcheted the rhetoric of the debate to fever pitch. “It is clearly an earthquake,” warns U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein. “There could be no clearer signal for the need to take action.” Yet what should that action be? A worldwide ban on reproductive cloning might force the Raelians and the Antinoris out of the public spotlight, but it most likely would do little to stop them from fiddling with human DNA in their labs. A ban on all forms of human cloning wouldn’t either. But it would stifle one of the most promising areas of medical research to emerge since the discovery of the double helix 50 years ago: embryonic stem cells.
Stem-cell research, some of which entails cloning, offers a decent chance, perhaps the best chance, of finding treatments or cures for many troublesome human diseases, from Parkinson’s to AIDS to diabetes. Abortion politics have already put the brakes on embryonic-stem-cell research in the United States. The fear now is that cloning politics will bring more onerous restrictions, perhaps even leading to an outright ban. That might delay treatments for years. “The amount of emphasis that’s been placed on reproductive cloning is out of proportion to any potential danger,” says Gregory Stock, a science-policy expert at UCLA.
From the pace of cloning in recent years, no wonder the issue looms so large. Since the birth of Dolly the sheep in 1996, scientists have cloned a whole menagerie of animals–pigs, cows, goats, mice, rabbits and even a house cat and an oxlike beast called a gaur. Animal cloning is a commercial business. drop your genes here, says the sign on the glass doors of Genetic Savings & Clone, a gene bank in College Station, Texas. The company offers its services to ranchers who want to clone prized cat-tle. The procedure is still too expensive to be commonplace, says CEO Lou Hawthorne, but in a few years he expects prices to come down and cattle cloning to become a big business.
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that cloning is a perfected art. Animal cloners put up with abnormalities from excessive birth weight to malformed hearts, livers and other organs. Birth defects occur at an alarming rate of 20 to 30 percent, compared with 1 or 2 percent for natural births. In some cases, problems are evident at birth. Other conditions like severe arthritis or heart problems don’t appear until adulthood. “Even if you have a live birth, you have no idea of the long-term effects,” says reproductive physiologist Mark Westhusin of Texas A&M’s College of Veterinary Medicine. For animal cloners, these are issues of cost and quality control. For those who would clone humans, or even pets, they’re grave safety concerns. “The difference is, you can kill an abnormal calf,” says Hawthorne. “We slaughter cows all the time.” Safety is the strongest ethical argument against human cloning.
Many countries have rightly banned the practice. In the United States abortion politics polarizes any issue of human reproduction, and cloning is no different. Virtually all U.S. politicians express an abhorrence of reproductive cloning, but political stalemate has prevented a federal ban. Last year the House passed a bill that would forbid all forms of human cloning, including the therapeutic cloning that would be part of some stem-cell therapies. The new Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, supports a complete ban much like the House bill and is expected to push for one. In the meantime, the Bush administration has been trying to export its policies on cloning. Last year France and Germany petitioned the United Nations to ban human-reproductive cloning. The Bush administration and the Vatican opposed the measure in favor of a sweeping ban of all types of human cloning, including therapeutic.
Would a ban halt reproductive cloning? More likely it would drive would-be cloners underground; technical obstacles will probably be the real limiting factor. “The Raelians have as much chance to have cloned something as I have–which is to say, zero,” says Caplan. “The science is not there to justify the myth that cloning happened or will happen soon or in fact is likely to happen ever.” Other experts think human cloning is inevitable. Even if a safe technique were perfected, it’s unlikely that many people would even want to make a clone. The prospect of, say, a couple cloning their infant daughter who died in a car accident is creepy. But it’s worth asking how much creepier it would be than conceiving people in test tubes, or whether it would pose as big a threat to society as the prospect of rich people being able to select the genetic traits of their infants–a realistic possibility that has nothing to do with cloning. On the other hand, a ban on therapeutic cloning, or a more comprehensive ban on embryonic tissue research including stem cells, would, according to many scientists, have a devastating effect on medical research (box).
Stem cells were first discovered in human embryos in the mid-1990s. Their existence is confined to the first week or so of an embryo’s life, when it consists of a ball of 100 or so cells, called a blastocyst. Afterward the cells begin to “differentiate”–they turn into brain, nerve, muscle, bone and hundreds of other types of cells. Organs form, and the fetus begins to take on a recognizable shape. Only cells harvested during the blastocyst stage possess the power to morph into any type of human cell. They are a treasure trove of information on the deepest mysteries of human development. Studying them could lead to medical advances in many different directions that are impossible to predict.
The religious right objects to embryonic-stem-cell research in general because it involves the use of embryos. But the link to cloning is specific to only one aspect of the research: the prospect of using stem cells to grow replacement tissue tailor-made for each patient. This is no small thing. If scientists could figure out how to make stem cells turn into any kind of cell they want–a tall, but not impossible task–they might be able to grow brain cells to replace those damaged by Parkinson’s, or pancreatic tissue for diabetics or blood cells for cancer patients. As organ-transplant patients are only too aware, replacement parts that don’t genetically match the recipient risk rejection by the body’s immune system.
Creating this genetic match is where cloning comes in. Scientists would take a human egg cell, remove the DNA from its nucleus and replace it with DNA taken from, say, one of the patient’s skin cells. They’d allow the egg to divide for a few days, harvest the stem cells and grow them in a separate petri dish. By treating the culture with biochemicals, they would push the proper genetic “buttons” to induce the stem cells to grow into the kind of tissue they needed–brain, heart, pancreas, whatever.
Although scientists are still working out this recipe, there’s reason to think it will pay off. Researchers at University Hospital in Lund, Sweden, have been experimenting for more than a decade on grafting tissue from fetal cadavers onto the brains of Parkinson’s sufferers. “Patient No. 7,” a 59-year-old British man who prefers anonymity, couldn’t button his own shirt when he volunteered for the treatment in 1993. Now he speaks a bit faster than he would like and his body jerks a bit. But he’s off drug treatments altogether, and runs his own software consultancy. “I feel pretty good,” he says. “It’s when I see myself in videos that I remember I have Parkinson’s.” No. 7, of course, is one of the lucky ones. Of 18 patients treated at Lund, 10 have showed some improvement. “We need to have a better source of cells,” says Anders Bjorklund, head of research for the program. “Stem cells could be the answer.”
The United States has already endangered this promise with inconsistent and opaque policies that straitjacket American scientists. In August 2001, President Bush announced that federal money could support work only on human embryonic-stem-cell lines that already existed at that point. Of the 78 approved cell lines, only nine are currently available to researchers.
Although privately funded researchers in the United States are free to create new stem-cell lines, the political controversy over human cloning has kept investors at bay. “There’s a big cloud of uncertainty,” says Linda Powers, president of Toucan Investment. “Investors are wary.” BresaGen, an Australian company with a lab in Athens, Georgia, has sold stem-cell cultures to six U.S. labs. Still, the mix of poor economy and hostile political atmosphere makes finding investors a challenge. “I’m in fund-raising mode at the moment,” says CEO John Smeaton.
So far the real winners have been labs in the United Kingdom, Sweden and Singapore. The government of Singapore approved stem-cell and therapeutic-cloning research in July and now wants to transform itself into a world-class life sciences hub by 2010. It is building a state-of-the-art biomedical R&D center, called Biopolis, to bring together venture capitalists, researchers, clinical scientists and academics. ES Cell International (ESI), a stem-cell research group co-owned by Singapore and an Australian investment consortium, recently hired Alan Coleman, who helped clone Dolly the sheep, as chief science officer. Ariff Bongso, a researcher at the National University of Singapore, was the first scientist to isolate stem cells from human embryos in the mid-1990s, though a team from the University of Wisconsin beat him to the patent office. He’s learned his lesson: his team is now aggressively marketing new stem-cell lines.
When it comes to regulatory harmony, Britain gets top marks. Last February the government approved work on frozen embryos left over from in vitro fertilization, and will allow strictly regulated therapeutic cloning. Scientists apply for licenses, submit to grilling from fellow academics, file reports on how the embryos are being used and entertain inspectors unannounced.
British scientists are reaping the rewards. The government is pumping millions into stem-cell research. In December it launched the world’s first human-stem-cell bank to maintain the cell lines, manage the intellectual-property rights and make cells available to scientists. “The U.K. offers an extraordinary freedom that is only possible because of strictly regulated procedures that ensure public support for our work,” says embryologist Roger Pedersen, who left the University of California in 2001 to direct a new stem-cell research center at the University of Cambridge.
U.S. politicians would do well to keep this research boom in mind as the cloning debate gathers steam. Pedersen was a pioneer in embryonic stem cells, but he grew tired of battling Washington over funding. “I wasn’t about to give up pursuing the best science possible,” says Pedersen. “American policy is restrictive and volatile. Consequently, the U.S. is risking its lead.” Despite the emotions sparked by the Raelians, that’s a high price to pay just to close down what is really a sideshow.
