The dawn of the duplicates ... clone babies
USA Today
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| Future glimpsed In October 1993, scientists at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., announced that they had cloned a human embryo. The researchers had not obtained prior approval from the university's institutional review board, and were instructed to destroy their data. That golden fleece A nation divided |
Brigitte Boisselier, a bishop of the Raelians and managing director of a Raelian company called Clonaid, announced the Dec. 26 birth of Eve, the alleged clone of a 31-year-old U.S. woman, at the end of December. Raelians claim to believe that space aliens created the human race by cloning.
On Tuesday, Clonaid spokeswoman Nadine Gary said the mother returned to the United States with her baby Monday.
A lawyer in Florida, meanwhile, on Tuesday asked a judge to appoint a guardian for the baby, saying Clonaid is trying to commercially exploit the child, who needs specialized medical monitoring.
Boisselier said four more clones will be born this month or next and that two are clones of dead children. She promised to provide proof of baby Eve's clone pedigree in a few days.
Scientists and experts on cloning expressed immediate skepticism.
"The report from these people is very strange and hard to believe," said Ryuzo Yanagimachi, the University of Hawai'i professor who pioneered the cloning of mice.
He said it is premature and unethical to use cloning technology for human experiments.
Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, shares Yanagimachi's skepticism. Caplan said he opposes cloning for one simple reason: "It's not safe, so to use the technology right now is dangerous."
But at least two other groups claim to have clones incubating in women's wombs at secret locations outside the United States. One birth supposedly may happen this month.
The human cloning train left the station on Aug. 7, 2001, when the National Academy of Sciences invited Boisselier and two controversial fertility specialists to a conference in Washington, D.C. The academy, regarded as the most prestigious scientific body in the United States, held the conference to examine scientific data from animal cloning experiments.
It concluded that the error rate in animal experiments was too high and could result in significant losses of embryos, high rates of miscarriage and potential birth defects. Ethics aside, the academy said that human cloning should not be attempted until scientists better understand what they are doing, that success appeared to be based more on luck than on predictable techniques.
Boisselier, along with Severino Antinori, a fertility specialist in Rome, and Panos Zavos, a fertility specialist in Lexington, Ky., had publicly stated their intentions to clone humans. All had been invited to testify before Congress on numerous occasions. The academy invited them to the conference to explain why they believe human cloning should be done.
All three said that none of the scientists conducting animal cloning knew what they were doing in regard to those species' fetal biology and that they themselves were unlikely to make the same mistakes with better-understood human reproductive medicine.
Gene already out of bottle
Antinori announced last March at a conference in the United Arab Emirates that he would produce a human clone by this month. Zavos announced last August that he would begin cloning procedures with an infertile American couple last fall. Boisselier, Antinori and Zavos all have received wide publicity regarding their claims and have not provided any proof of their accomplishments.
Proof or not, since Boisselier's announcement, ethicists have begun sounding the alarms.
"Cloning is Ground Zero for the clash between reproductive technology and ethics," says Robert Parham, executive director of the Baptist Center for Ethics in Nashville, Tenn. "Unfortunately, the crazy science of Clonaid presses the real issue off the page of public discernment. The real issue is: How do we think morally about a topic where science has outstripped our traditional ethics?"
Many scientists have cast doubt on Clonaid's scientific expertise. Others say creating a clone is technically not that difficult. All that is needed is essentially the same setup as for an in-vitro fertilization clinic. The infrastructure for human cloning already is in place.
"Because of in-vitro fertilization clinics, there's so much going on in terms of collecting eggs, collecting sperm, fertilizing eggs and culturing embryos, that in fact a lot of the technical problems you'd think you'd have with humans probably don't exist," says James Murray, a professor of animal science at the University of California-Davis.
Egg for egg, more work has been done and more has been learned about handling human embryos in clinics than anyone has accomplished with animal embryos. Techniques developed for cloning Dolly the sheep (the first mammal clone on record) have been widely published and available since 1997.
Twin, lose or draw
To create a baby via in-vitro fertilization, a technician inserts DNA from sperm into an egg, where it is mixed with the egg's DNA. To make a clone, DNA from a skin cell or any cell in the body is inserted into an egg that has been stripped of most of its own DNA. Anyone can be trained to perform either procedure.
The real issue is how many mistakes a cloner is willing to accept to generate a single healthy living clone. The problem lies with the DNA taken from a mature adult cell that will make the clone. Genes in adult DNA are programmed for daily activities of adult life, but those necessary for instructing an embryo to develop and become a fetus have been shut down since embryonic development.
Scientists who clone animals have found that maybe three to six out of 100 attempts at making an animal clone actually proceed to a live birth, a rate that suggests a lot of luck is involved. The hottest area of cloning research is in "reprogramming" adult DNA for embryonic development. The biotech industry is pouring tens of millions of dollars into figuring this out.
Scientists such as Mark Westhusin, a veterinarian and director of the reproductive sciences laboratory at Texas A&M, and Murray have spent years learning the techniques needed to get these microscopic clusters of cells to grow and divide. Westhusin works with cattle, Murray with goats. Cloning pioneer Ian Wilmut has established an institute for studying reprogramming in Scotland.
Boisselier claimed Clonaid achieved 10 pregnancies and that five miscarried within three weeks. The Raelians have said they have 50 female volunteers willing to carry cloned embryos. The group claims 55,000 members and advertises a business in buying and selling human eggs on the Clonaid Web site, www.clonaid.com.
Scientists say that if the group created hundreds of embryos and implanted those that were viable in enough women, they could generate a living clone. What remains to be seen, if the baby is confirmed to be a clone, is whether it remains healthy. Some of the disorders in cloned animals that may be related to the process do not appear until months or several years after birth.
Scientists have challenged the claim based on the peculiarities of the Raelian movement. Founder Rael, formerly known as Claude Vorilhon, says he was taken aboard a UFO in 1973 and told humans are a race of clones of space aliens.
The Washington Post has noted that the Raelian's claim is similar to a 1978 story about scientists who cloned a human on an undisclosed Pacific island.
A court-ordered demand for evidence led to a legal finding in 1981 that the story was false.
Advertiser staff writer Tanya Bricking contributed to this report.
