When Yoda announced the commencement of a clone war, few in the movie audience took him seriously. But last month, when a British biotech company announced it had sponsored the first successful birth of a cloned human being, moviegoers had to reconsider their skepticism. A cloned human population seemed to be at least one small step closer to becoming reality.
However, when scientists began to examine the extraordinary claims of Brigitte Boisselier and her company, Clonaid, it soon became apparent that the supposed birth probably had more to do with fiction than with fact. Clonaid refused to present solid evidence of its feat, and rumors began to surface that the company was backed by a religious cult, the Raelians, whose goals include creating human clones in an effort to achieve immortality.
Alta Charo, a University of Wisconsin medical ethicist, confirmed the unlikelihood of the company’s declarations and talked about recently attending a forum with Boisselier.
“She made claims that she was doing [biological] tests on embryos,” Charo said. “The problem was that [those] tests can’t be done on embryos. [Clonaid has] no technical qualifications.”
The Raelians — the group that funds Clonaid — was founded in 1973 by a French journalist known today as Rael. Rael says he came into contact with Elohim, an alien who claims he created the human race by cloning people from his own genetic makeup.
According to Rael’s recollection, Elohim contacted him to request an embassy be built for the Raelians upon his return to the earth with his prophets: Jesus, Muhammad, Moses and Buddha.
Peter Sobol, a UW honorary fellow in the history of science department, would not classify the Raelians as members of a valid religion but rather as a cult group. Like other cult groups, Rael takes aim at those most vulnerable to new and farfetched beliefs and takes advantage of them, Sobol said.
“It’s this category of people that starts a scam and then starts to believe it themselves. Rael is in that group. They never had a huge following, and mostly they seem to reap personal benefits,” said Sobol, who compared Rael to other cult groups that have existed in the United States and are famous for bizarre beliefs and sometimes coming to violent ends.
“Rael joins a line of people who have claimed to have been contacted by space people,” Sobol said. He also pointed out the group’s known engagement in exploitative sexual acts with women.
Charo further questioned Clonaid’s credentials in conducting scientific research.
“They have no technical qualifications,” she said. “Their lab was not reflective of proper scientists.”
While Clonaid’s and the Raelians’ inability to produce tangible evidence of a cloned human have caused them to lose face in the world’s scientific community, they have achieved at least one goal of their endeavor: increasing international discussion on both the technology and ethics behind cloning. This has sparked heated debate between those who argue for the potential scientific breakthroughs and those who perceive the act of cloning living beings as crossing an ethical line and violating religious values. Or, quite simply, playing God.
Science’s say
The process of cloning begins when a surrogate egg cell is prepared by first removing that cell’s nucleus. A genetically enhanced nucleus from a desired clone cell — containing the entirety of the clone’s critical DNA — is then inserted into the egg cell. After some electric stimulation, the hybrid egg cell/nucleus begins to divide, and, if the process succeeds, the clone can continue to develop into a human fetus.
While Clonaid declined to provide any evidence of the existence of their cloned fetus for fear of losing possession of what they claim is a cloned child, other scientists have already proven their ability to clone living organisms.
In February 1997, scientists at the Roslin Institution in Scotland were able to clone a sheep named Dolly. The process was hardly smooth. More than 277 surrogate mothers attempted to host the cloned embryo before Dolly was actually born.
The Roslin Institution’s low success rate was atypical for the industry; in attempts to clone animals, only 1 percent to 5 percent actually survived until adulthood. Since Dolly’s birth, scientists have cloned everything from mice to cattle.
While scientists have been hard-pressed to perfect full-human cloning, a technique called therapeutic cloning is already well-developed. Therapeutic cloning follows the same initial procedure as reproductive cloning, but rather than forming an embryo, various body cells are created. By either taking cells from a specific body site or by adding chemicals, scientists can produce essentially any type of cell.
Banning cry
Since the discovery of cloning, governmental organizations worldwide have attempted to impose regulations on what scientists can and cannot do. In March of 1997, less than a year after Dolly’s birth, former President Bill Clinton banned the use of federal funding for human-cloning projects in America.
More recently, the United Nations Educational, Science and Cultural Organization called for a worldwide ban on human cloning. Additionally, the Food and Drug Administration has publicly insisted on strict enforcement of scientific experimentation on cloning.
The U.S. Congress is currently considering a cloning ban proposed by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., and Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., which is essentially a reintroduction of a ban passed by the House of Representatives in 2001 but never considered by the Senate. The bill retains its ban on all importation of cloned human embryos but no longer bans the importation of treatments discovered outside the United States that use human-cloning techniques.
However, if strict legislation passes, the effects could be detrimental to the science and medical fields, Charo warns.
“It’s the most effective way people have ever thought of to treat genetic disease,” said Charo, who opposes the banning of cloning research due to its potential scientific and medical benefits.
UW oncology professor Waclaw Syzbalski, who has conducted genetic-therapy research, shares Charos’ sentiments and opposes the crackdown on cloning, citing its potential for repairing damaged or dysfunctional human body parts.
“You can make tissue replacements … and actually replace existent cells with new ones,” Charo said.
Gene therapy
As cloning research further develops and becomes more useful in the world of science and medicine, another type of cell manipulation is at its heels: gene therapy. Discovered in the mid-’70s, this cloning-like process involves inserting copies of genes into cells holding dysfunctional genes. The idea is to correct the medical problem at a very basic level: DNA.
“Gene therapy is to replace a faulty gene, a small segment of DNA, with a new gene.” Szybalski said.
Gene therapy falls into two distinct categories. The first, somatic cell therapy, alters an individual’s genome but does not pass that change on to future generations. Germ-line therapy, however, enhances sperm and egg cells with the purpose of passing the change on to the next generation.
By adding this technology to cloning capabilities, “you could not only make an identical person but identical plus an improvement,” Szybalski said.
If this were to take place, eugenics would become a possibility. Eugenics is defined as “the study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding.”
Although this statement does cover the general purpose of the process, it can be misleading. The term “improvement,” at this point in science, refers to fixing faulty genes and possibly curing fatal diseases, not engineering humans with specific attributes. However, this latter option is a fear many people have as this practice continues to advance in its capabilities.
Szybalski cautions society against assuming the worst.
“[It’s] all theoretical because it was never done in humans, but practical, because it was done in animals,” he said.
Even so, today’s gene-therapy technologies are far from accomplishing such a task.
“In principal, it’s good, but scientists need another 20 to 30 years to make it better.” Szybalski said.
Stem cells
While the science of reproductive cloning has received its share of attention the past few months, stem-cell research, which has helped to further develop gene-therapy techniques, has been an ongoing debate pitting scientists against ethicists in the same way as the conflict surrounding cloning.
In 1995, UW researchers led by Dr. James Thomson were able to completely isolate stem cells, the precursor cells that hold the potential for developing into various types of cells. By 1998, the scientists, for the first time ever, were able to create embryonic stem cells. Since then, UW has set up a foundation to study them.
Creating replacement cells for mutated or damaged tissue has been a primary goal of medical experts researching stem-cell technology.
Andrew Cohn, spokesperson for WiCell Research Institution, Inc., a group dedicated to the advancement of stem-cell technology, sees the medical prospects of developing stem cells as too beneficial to pass up.
“We’re still very early, [but] we are working on creating heart cells, nerve cells and pancreatic cells.” Cohn said.
Yet despite scientific claims to the potential benefits to human health further stem-cell research might lead to, many critics have raised red flags, concerned about just what genetic toying might enable people to do in the future if it falls into the wrong hands.
Social and ethical problems
While there is still no hard evidence that scientists have ever created a fully cloned human, mixed results from past attempts at human duplication have left some scientists lukewarm toward the idea of continuing research. In animals, the success rate has remained low, and the detrimental effects that afflict some of these clones scare off some researchers from trying to salvage research in progress.
“I’m against [human cloning] now for the simple reason that there are too many birth defects,” Szybalski said.
Other issues, such as cloned individuals’ places in society and their own self-view, come into question. If introduced into today’s environment, what is the clone’s role — a great medical experiment, a scientific wonder or a man surpassing God and religion?
Furthermore, skeptics say, if human cloning is achieved, what would prevent people from engineering their children to have certain physical and biological attributes?
Apart from all the curiosity surrounding clones’ purpose, critics wonder if, on the most basic level, cloning is even ethical.
At this point, research and experimentation are still being done so that scientists and society can understand the full effects of such technology. For now, at least, it seems like an “Attack of the Clones” is still light-years away.
