ALL it took was a few words from one maverick scientist to send the media
into a flat spin. Richard Seed, a Chicago-based physicist, brought the world to
his door last week when he announced that he plans to open a clinic to produce
cloned human babies for desperate couples.
Of course, he is extremely unlikely to succeed because he has neither the
money nor the team of experts needed for the challenge. But, like other
mavericks throughout history, he has forced us to think about his plans to do
what many would wish was the undoable.
Which is precisely the point. Too many bits of the technology needed to
produce a human clone are already being developed for other, widely accepted
medical treatments or for research purposes. And because human cloning cannot go
on looking difficult for long, President Bill Clinton and the doctors and
scientists demanding a worldwide ban on cloning won’t be able to delay someone,
somewhere, making a success of it.
Techniques to transfer a nucleus from one cell to another are being perfected
using monkeys because it may be easier to study deadly diseases such as AIDS
using standardised animals
(see p 4). And couples are already benefiting from
techniques not dissimilar from those that could be used in cloning.
Only last July, The Lancet reported that an infertile woman gave
birth after one of her eggs was treated by adding cytoplasm from the eggs of a
younger donor and fertilising it with sperm from the infertile woman’s
In this case, cytoplasm was transferred from a donor to rejuvenate another
woman’s egg and the happy outcome was that a couple were able to have their own
biological child. Technically, it is not a vast leap to transfer a human
And as the furore over Seed’s proposed clinic demonstrates, there will be
people who want a clone. Experience worldwide shows that infertile couples may
go to enormous lengths to pass on their genes. Given that the alternative is to
accept a donation of sperm or egg, and so have a child that is genetically half
their own, there will be couples who would prefer to try for a child who is a
clone of one of them.
After all, they can argue that nature already produces twins. And while
identical twins of the same age catch the eye, would anyone notice that a
middle-aged person’s baby was really a clone? Age changes people: can anyone
recognise the famous person the baby on this page grew up to be?
Changes in attitude towards reproductive technologies can be very fast. Less
than a century ago, people were appalled by the artificial insemination of
animals. Twenty years ago, the birth of the first test-tube baby created a storm
of controversy. Now IVF is just another acronym in the dictionary.
Our first reactions are often emotional. Maverick though he may be, Seed has
made us aware that demand for cloning will come from the powerful desire for
humans to have their own children. It is easy to dismiss Seed. It is another
thing to argue against human nature.