December 2, 2001

Cloning A Human Being May Be Possible, But Pointless

Politicians, religious leaders, and pro-life advocates fought for media space last week to denounce a “promising” experiment in human cloning – only it wasn’t promising, and it wasn’t cloning.

No matter. Ethics/morality of the attempt merits serious thought about future work in this new field of science. It is certain that Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester, Mass., will keep trying.

The company announced modest success in producing a blastocyst of six “stem cells” within a partially fertilized egg from a woman donor. The tiny tumor, about the size of a needlepoint, died before growing further.

The process involved extracting all genetic DNA from the egg, replacing this with a tiny bit of skin from a man and incubating the reconstituted egg. The resulting growth was exactly the same as the male donor. It was not partially that also of the female donor.

The National Pro-Life Religious Council, representing groups within all Christian denominations, called for Dr. Michael D. West, president of Advanced Cell, to cease cloning activity. They want to discuss with him “the grave moral and ethical consequences of playing God by manufacturing human beings.”

The Vatican issued a statement of its view: “Notwithstanding the humanistic intents, it shows the moral gravity of this project and calls for unequivocal condemnation.”

Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) joined ten religious and pro-life groups for a news conference urging the Senate “to pass a complete ban on human cloning immediately.”

The firestorm of disapproval prompted President Bush to declare: “The use of embryos to clone is wrong. We should not as a society grow life to destroy it.”

Later he described cloning as “crossing the line” and urged the Senate to act on a House bill banning the procedure. The House voted 265-162 in July to make it a crime “to perform, or attempt to perform, human cloning.”

Larry Goldstein, biochemist at the University of California San Diego, says: “It’s a stretch to call what Advanced Cell Technology did as cloning an embryo. I don’t know what they made; but it was not human.”

Advanced Cell – and a dozen other laboratories – is trying to produce undifferentiating (stem) cells that can replace damaged cells in the body of the tissue donor. The process is more accurately called “therapeutic cloning.”

If primitive cells can be produced, they might benefit patients afflicted by spinal injury, diabetes or Parkinson disease.

Whatever the semantics, blastocysts of stem cells -- that lack a balancing set of opposite-sex genes -- are alive only in the sense they can proliferate. However, they can “live” only in the body from which the one set of genes came.

It might be possible to produce an exact copy of just one human, but to what purpose? Clones can not begat progeny.

People are destined forever to inherit bodily qualities of a male and female – combining some features of each. “Why, he looks just like his father,” or, “She has her mother’s disposition,” or, “You can tell they are brother and sister.”

Of course, fertility doctors frequently fertilize female eggs with male sperm artificially in a petri dish. Incubation can take place within the womb of an un-met host woman – to the joy of childless couples. However, it still takes two to tango.

Once an egg containing a chain of female chromosomes is mated with a chain of male chromosomes – by whatever process – a human life is created. That life deserves to be born alive to fulfill nature’s unfathomable plan. To interfere with such an awesome process is morally wrong.

Yes, a viable female egg is necessary to clone a process that may not end with a baby. But consider: A woman will produce more than 200 ova in her childbearing years. Ten of these, at most, will attain their destiny of becoming new beings. About 190 or so eggs will be wasted.

If some of those divinely-inspired wasted ovum can be salvaged for the benefit of God’s suffering humans – isn’t that also an expression of His will?

With the knowledge that true cloning would be a one- time stunt – and that nature is overly prolific with eggs and sperm -- everyone can relax. We can look forward to a healthy, longer life of service without aggravating God or each other. See my column in the Our Town section.

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PARTING SHOTS

Congress may suspend payroll taxes – backbone for Social Security -- for one month to stimulate the economy. This is reminiscent of an old TV commercial: “You can pay me (a little) now, or pay me (more) later.

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The Enron Corporation, an energy broker caught short by the California electric power debacle, has declared the largest bankruptcy in history. Tell us again about the greed of big business.

By Lindsey Williams, columnist for Sun Coast Media Group newspapers