Cloning people is:
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A: immoral, or
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B: healthy
Related Why Files stories
POSTED 19 FEB 1998.
One year after headlines told us that a lamb named Dolly was cloned from a cell of an adult sheep, we still don't have an answer. Is cloning human beings a good idea? It hasn't been done yet, but cloning people may be no harder than cloning sheep.
Time for a word from the skeptics:
Those doubts were not being heard one year ago when the Dolly announcement prompted President Clinton to call for a ban on human cloning. The issue resurfaced in late 1997 when a Chicago physicist with the curious name of Dr. Richard Seed began planning to clone people in some offshore haven where he could operate without meddlesome federal oversight.
Is Dolly really a clone? Some scientists have recently pointed out that the sheep from whose cell Dolly originated was pregnant, and pregnant mammals may have fetal cells in their blood. That raises the possibility that Dolly was a clone of a fetal cell, a feat already accomplished. Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Philadelphia, Ian Wilmut, the Scottish researcher who helped create Dolly, said such a mistake was extremely unlikely, but that his laboratory was tracking down the possibility. Wilmut is also trying to clone other species, and expects that another adult-cell cloning will be reported within a year.
First things first
Before delving into the moral morass of human cloning, you may want to read the technical story.
Second things second
The Why Files knows you want to talk about the juicy stuff -- making new replicas first. That's fine with us... Let's tackle the "Dr. Seed solution."
Wilmut, the fellow who raised all this ruckus, says making people -- "reproductive cloning" -- is beyond the pale because cloning causes an unacceptable number of deaths in the womb and at birth. Using data from cloned fetal or adult cells (Dolly was the only known adult-cell clone), he says 1 in 5 lambs die at birth. "It's bad enough if it's a lamb, but I shudder to think that this would be a child. It isn't safe, and it should be prohibited on those grounds alone for the foreseeable future."
But cloning is still at the "Wright brothers" stage, and it will doubtless improve with time. As Wilmut admits, "Biologically there's no reason why it could not be developed for humans if we wanted." Researchers are feverishly working with other mammals, and "it's impossible to predict when it will become more efficient."
So there's no escaping the question. Do we want to clone people? Should we clone whole new people with known genetic blueprints?
In discussing the ethics of cloning we must separate making spare body parts from making whole people.
