In
the aftermath of Dolly, the world’s first cloned mammal,
the controversy over cloning has taken on new urgency.
Chicago physicist Richard Seed
recently announced his plan to clone a human being within the
next two years. This has raised fundamental questions about
the effect of technology on our lives and what it means to be
human.
These complex questions were at
the center of a conference on cloning held last week at the
CSUH University Union. Over 150 people attended.
“With the tremendous march
of technology, the question is not what we do with cloning today,
but what do we do five years or 10 years from now,” said
moderator Michael Shutz, from the department of sociology at
CSUH.
The conference left little time
for biology Professor Steve Benson and philosophy Professor
Roberta Millstein to discuss the process, practical uses and
ethical considerations of the issue.
In an energetic introduction,
Shutz identified ambivalence, or the opposition of two powerful
forces, as the key word in the cloning debate.
Cloning means making multiple
copies, and cloning humans would only be a minor application
of this technology, according to Benson, who provided an overview
of the cloning process and its limitations.
“From an ethical point of
view, I don't think any scientists in their right mind are really
thinking about (cloning humans),” Benson said.
The
nuclear cloning technology used to create Dolly is “very
inefficient,” he added (out of 277 nuclear transfers, Dolly
was the only lamb born).
The most profitable use of cloning
will be to create animals that produce valuable therapeutic
hormones, |
enzymes,
and proteins, such as clotting factor for hemophiliacs, Benson
said.
“You can engineer a (cow)
gene so that the protein is produced (for clotting factor) and
it comes out in the milk,” he said.
Within the next 10–15 years,
cloning technology will allow biotechnologists to develop animals
that grow human-compatible organs for transplant. A few groans
accompanied Benson’s suggestion that pig cell nuclei could
be altered to make ‘humanized’ pig organs for transplanting
into humans.
Millstein characterized the two
opposite camps on the cloning issue as “cool, let’s
do it” and “yuk, I can't believe you’re even
contemplating it.”
Most cloning arguments are centered
on the common, false supposition of “genetic determinism—that
our DNA uniquely determines the kind of person we are,”
Millstein said. Identical twins are nature’s clones, yet
despite sharing the same DNA, egg and environment, twins can
differ in weight, personality and myriad other ways, she added.
In the event a human can be cloned,
the nucleus with the donor’s DNA will be affected by the
host egg, the womb’s complex chemical composition and the
time period and environment in which the child is raised.
“Our genes do not uniquely
determine who we are,” Millstein said. “Genetically
identical does not mean physically identical.”
After outlining the pros and cons
of cloning humans, Millstein pointed out that the decision on
whether or not to clone is difficult.
“The answer is far from obvious,”
she said. “We just have to face the issue squarely and
rationally.” |
