THAT DAMNED LAMB

Far be it from me to go leaping onto bandwagons, but that damned lamb is too much to resist.

As I begin this essay, it has been just about a week since Ian Wilmut and Keith H. S. Campbell of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, hit the news with their announcement of the July 1996 birth of Dolly, a lamb that was the genetic duplicate of an adult sheep. That is, for the first time ever, a mammal had been cloned. And it seemed quite obvious that the cloning of humans was only one small step into the future. (See Nature, February 27, 1997, for the full report; when I wrote this they had a fair amount of cloning material on their Web page.)

After all, the process is in essence very simple. The Scottish researchers took a single cell from an adult sheep mammary gland and moved that cell's gene-containing nucleus into an egg cell whose own nucleus had been removed and discarded. The resulting combination cell then developed into an embryo and eventually a lamb in just the way a normal egg cell does after being fertilized with a sperm cell. However, the combo cell does not always cooperate; Wilmut, Campbell, and their coworkers manufactured about 300 combos to get just nine lambs. They expect their success ratio to improve.

Why a sheep? Well, all snide sniggers about "embraceable ewe" aside, sheep are not unusual research animals. They're a handy size for surgical procedures, they're fairly cooperative, and they don't have expensive tastes in feed. They also represent a valuable agricultural sector, and one of the major justifications for the research has been cloning's potential for multiplying the best agricultural animals.

According to Dr. Wilmut, "Animal breeding companies are already showing interest in the use of this technology to multiply their best animals. It takes many years for animal breeders to transfer the progress they make in elite selection herds to the commercial farmer. A limited amount of cloning would speed this process up substantially, bringing the meat or milk yield of the average cow or sheep closer to that of the best."

There is also great potential for multiplying sheep (and goats, pigs, cows, etc.) that have been genetically engineered to produce human proteins (enzymes and hormones; see William H. Velander, Henryk Lubon, and William N. Drohan, "Transgenic Livestock as Drug Factories," Scientific American, January 1997) or organs modified to be acceptable to the human immune system when used for transplants. (High-tech cloning from single plant cells is already paying off in forestry, and every time one grows a flower, houseplant, or fruit tree from a cutting or a graft, one is using a much older version of the same process.)

Why not a human? In the United Kingdom, it has been illegal since 1990 to manipulate human embryos the way the Edinburgh team manipulated their sheep embryos. But even if it were legal, cloning a human being would give people the willies. In fact, initial reactions in the news media and on the Web make it clear that cloning a sheep is giving people the willies.

Consider the Church of Scotland's Society, Religion and Technology Project, whose director, Dr. Donald Bruce, goes on at some length about how "nature is not ours to do exactly what we like with."

A great many people seem to agree. In 1994, the U.S. National Advisory Board on Ethics in Reproduction called the whole idea of cloning oneself "bizarre... narcissistic and ethically impoverished." Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, wonders, "What is the ethical purpose of even trying?" Conservative columnist George Will asks whether humans are now uniquely endangered since "the great given--a human being is the product of the union of a man and a woman--is no longer a given" and "humanity is supposed to be an endless chain, not a series of mirrors." (Yes, I know, he commits that fundamental philosophical error of confusing "what is" with "what should be"; conservatives do that a lot.)

Others go further. Even Wilmut and his colleagues say cloning humans would be unethical. U.S. President Bill Clinton has asked the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, chaired by Harold T. Shapiro, president of Princeton University, to investigate the implications of this "stunning" research and issue a final report by the end of May, saying that "Any discovery that touches upon human creation is not simply a matter of scientific inquiry. It is a matter of morality and spirituality as well." He has also barred the use of U.S. funds to support work on cloning humans. Carl Felbaum, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, said in a CNN interview that extending this technique to humans "should be prohibited if necessary by law. ... This is not a line we want to cross. ... not even a line we want to approach."

That line will be crossed soon enough, however. The first step has already been taken. Only days after Dolly's birth announcement, a team of scientists at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center announced that they had successfully transferred cells taken from monkey embryos into monkey eggs and produced two live monkeys. The technique is very similar to one Wilmut and his coworkers mastered on their way to cloning an adult sheep. No duplication of an adult was involved, but that is of course the obvious next step. And after monkeys must come apes, including the nakedest ape of them all.

Or have humans already been cloned? Way back in 1978, writer David Rorvik claimed to document the deed in In His Image: The Cloning of a Man, saying that "Max," a millionaire, had hired a scientist to set up a lab somewhere in Asia, tap the native ladies for eggs, refine the necessary techniques, and produce Max, Jr., who should be graduating from college just about now. Rorvik's claims stirred up quite a fuss, including a lawsuit, but in the end no one believed him and--as far as I know--his career self-destructed. (I reviewed the book for Analog in what became the very first of a great many review columns; to see the review, which includes a detailed summary of the book, click here).

Why would anyone want to clone humans? One old argument is that cloning could produce vast armies of identical super-warriors. It forgets that we can produce soldiers more cheaply in the traditional way, and the "super" is surely more a matter of training, equipment, and motivation than of genetics. This might change if we use genetic engineering to design warriors with new strengths and abilities; cloning would then be just as useful--and for the same reasons--as it is for animal breeders.

In England, Dr. Patrick Dixon, author of The Genetic Revolution (Kingsway), offers the thought that, "Supermodels could one day have a whole new career, selling cells from their bodies to make hundreds of 'perfect' human clones for tomorrow's parents." Perhaps, he adds, we could clone the dead from cells saved from their cadavers or retrieved from their tombs, and thus reclaim beloved children, spouses, and historical icons from the clutch of death.

Another argument for cloning humans is that some people are so uniquely valuable that they amount to national or even world treasures. We cannot afford to lose our Einsteins, Hawkings, Picassos, Beethovens, Michael Jordans, and Mother Teresas. Given the capability of cloning such folks, we would thus be foolish not to use it. Unfortunately, while genes are an important part of what makes us the people we are, so is our upbringing. Any clone of Einstein would surely have a high-powered brain but might apply it to music (Einstein played the violin), politics or public activism (Einstein had interests there as well), or business. Perhaps we are more likely to see cloning done by people with the money to pay for it and the ego to think they are national treasures.

Of broader appeal is the fact that a genetic duplicate of a person--either a clone or an identical twin--has identical chemistry. That is, an organ taken from your clone, like one from your identical twin, would be accepted by your immune system without any trouble at all. Organs from nonduplicates are rejected unless the immune system is suppressed with drugs; of course, then one is more vulnerable to infections and cancer.

This quickly leads to an idea much more familiar to science fiction readers than to the general public: Given the ability to clone, we might prepare genetic duplicates of each individual who can afford it and use the duplicates as sources for same-age or younger spare parts. We could start the clones when the original is an infant in order to provide insurance against childhood accidents and diseases, or later in life to insure against accidents, heart attacks, lung cancer, hepatitis, and other organ failures. We could keep the clones on ice, unconscious, their "personhood" only an undeveloped potential. Or we could keep them in cages and pens, and reflect upon the Fanny Farmer's Cookbook.

Michael Marshall Smith was very fortunate in the publication date for his novel, Spares (Bantam). The review copy arrived in my mail within days of Dolly's birth announcement. The book is too gory a jumble of SF and fantasy to be much good, but the gimmick is precisely what the title makes you think. Very topical, very likely to make author and publisher a bundle, and a movie is already in the works. It's also quite politically correct, for the spares of the title are there mostly to prove the black-hearted evil wickedness of the villain.

Such scenarios do a great deal to reinforce all the concern about the morality of developing the ability to clone. It is not acceptable to treat people like so many meat animals, to raise them only to be slaughtered for the benefit of others. The thought makes us all feel queasy; in some of us it provokes outrage and the urge to cut off the technology at its source.

But it is far too easy to imagine the next step beyond cloning, which we will never see if out of fear and queasiness we stifle the birth of the technology. That next step seems to me likely to be the cloning not of whole bodies (which, if human, must have the same rights as the rest of us), but of parts. Initially, I expect, we will see hearts and other organs grown in vats of nutrient fluid. Later, lost limbs will be regenerated from their stumps and hearts, lungs, etc., will be grown in situ, inside the body, right beside the failing organs they are destined to replace. Once the replacement is up to workable size, the original will be removed; perhaps we will even be able to instruct it to self-destruct, thus obviating the need for surgery. (The process must, of course, begin while the patient still has a few months of life left.)

If we can let the technology develop long enough to reach this stage, the moral problems will disappear. We may still be concerned about whether life should be indefinitely extended, but where a cloned body is a person, a cloned organ is not. The human rights of the patient will be the only rights that matter.

England's Dr. Patrick Dixon assures us that "The choice is ours. We cannot ignore this technology, nor should we condemn all of it. The key is proper regulation--not just in the UK but world-wide. Either we control gene technology today, or gene technology will redesign us by tomorrow." He seems an alarmist to me, though not as much so as some of the ethicists who have been quoted by the media as saying that cloning human beings is simply unthinkable. Some have even called the new development "a catastrophe."

Such reactions are the knee-jerks of people who simply aren't stopping to think the implications of this new technology through. Transition periods are normal in the development of new technologies. Today we take it for granted that everyone should have telephones and televisions, but there was a time when these devices were owned only by the wealthy. Was this unfair? Should these technologies have been banned because they were not equal-opportunity technologies? The same question has arisen in connection with Internet access: Should it be only for those individuals, schools, and communities that can pay for it? Or should government provide it free to those who cannot pay for it?

Fairness is also an issue with medical technologies. Should only the lives of the rich be saved with new, expensive techniques, with the rest of us forced to wait for the price to come down? We want the medical miracle now, we cry. There oughta be a law to force the insurance companies to cover it, and if we can't have it, no one should. Otherwise, medicine becomes just one more weapon of class warfare, one more means by which the haves oppress the have-nots.

I don't buy this, myself. We have to remember that "free" and "fair" are feel-good myths. If government provides Internet access, your taxes must go up. If insurance companies cover expensive procedures, your premiums must go up, perhaps to the point where you can't afford insurance at all. Sound familiar? Sound fair?

If we ban cloning, it will still be available to the rich. They'll go abroad, or visit sub rosa clinics. If we don't ban it, however, the technology may be misused, but it will also be permitted to develop further, perhaps to the point I sketched above. The price should also come down to where the non-wealthy can afford it; indeed, in situ organ cloning, initiated with nothing more than an injection, should be very affordable.

I suspect the resistance to new technologies such as cloning is really only part of a larger problem that can be best described by reminding you of something Francis Bacon said back in the 1600s: "Knowledge is power." By this he meant not knowledge of the boss's peccadilloes, but knowledge of the world and how it works, scientific and technological knowledge. Such knowledge gives one power to make things happen, to accomplish and achieve. It also gives one more power than is possessed by people who know less, but I don't think that was Bacon's point. In science, all knowledge is freely available to everyone willing and able to study for the years needed to acquire it.

Now put "knowledge is power" beside another clich‚: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The power that corrupts is political power, power over people, not power over nature, but people don't distinguish well between the concepts. The clich‚ thus defines a trend and an endpoint that easily translate to "The more one knows, the more corrupt one is." That is, knowledge and those who know are evil, not to be trusted, no matter how many goodies they promise for the future. To prove the case, there are Nazi death-camps, which used the technology of the assembly line to destroy eleven million people, and then the use of science and technology for warfare, from nuclear weaponry to nerve gases and engineered plagues. There is human experimentation in this country--for instance, the Tuskegee syphilis study and the human radiation experiments. Less evil, but just as disastrous, are the unforeseen consequences--silent springs, ozone holes, climate change, Chernobyls, and more.

Why then do so many surveys say that the American public thinks scientists and engineers are among the most trustworthy of folks? The public knows who is responsible for their televisions, remotes, CD players, computers, heart transplants, airplanes, electricity, and so on. They know that because of scientists and engineers they live longer, more healthily, and with more material goodies than any generation before them. They love science and technology.

At least as long as science and technology stay on familiar ground. But let them stray into new and unfamiliar territory where lie those things not meant for man to know (else God would have passed out science textbooks in Eden, instead of saying, "Don't eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge"), and the knowledge-power-evil equation comes back to mind, complete with thoughts of mad scientists and monsters and disasters both moral and physical.

And as long as science and technology refrain from challenging favorite shibboleths. Many people, after all, share a deep unwillingness to agree that science is always right or, if right, relevant. Just listen to the creationists, New Agers, homeopaths, some feminists, fans of the occult and paranormal, and more. (See Gary Stix, "Science versus Antiscience?" Scientific American, January 1997.)