Dolly the Clone, Where Art Thou?
February 20, 2009 by Afshin Yaghtin
Filed under Earth, Science and Innovation
Dolly, the clone, was “created” on February 22, 1997, as the result of a cell taken from an adult of its species and deposited into a surrogate mother.
The reaction, most had was astonishment, fear, an in some instances, outrage. But how do we feel now? Whether we have changed as individuals over the last decade or the shock of such a science-fiction-like event has worn off slightly over time, how is the story of animal–and potentially, human–cloning received today?
Proponents of cloning proffer the notion that cloning may one day help preserve endangered species, augment food supply, or provide organs for transplants.
Critics claim it is unnatural and unethical; that not only is cloning against God’s natural order of creation, but that the long term prospects of such social and scientific experiments are unpredictable and dangerous. Inbreeding, for instance, would pose a problem in such scenarios over the longterm, causing widespread birth defects and unexpected mutations.
And what about Dolly? After spawning four lambs of her own, she lived only 6 years–about half of the life expectancy of the average of her species, as she developed a lung cancer and was eventually euthenized. The Roslin Institue in Edinburgh, where she was born and died, pointed out that cancer is common in her breed.
Using nuclear transfer technology, many animals have been cloned since the fantastical day that Scottish scientists cloned Dolly.
Nuclear transfer technology is the “procedure for making a clone, or exact genetic copy, of an existng animal. In this procedure the nucleus containing the chromosomes is removed from the cell of one animal for fusion with an egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed. The life that results is the genetic equal of the animal that donated the nucleus.” (AAAS.ORG)
A lesser known fact is that the first actual clone was a tadpoal that was cloned in 1952, using embryonic cells. Hundreds of cloned animals exist today using nuclear transfer technology, including sheep, goats, cows, mice, pigs, cats, and rabbits.
How Close are We To Human Cloning?
Hhow close are we to sanctioned human cloning? Among current animal cloning experiments, the risks are extreme and the success rate are still fatally low. According to the Oakridge National Labratory, human cloning in its current form is highly inefficient. There are only about 1 or 2 viable clone offspring for every 100 attempts–that’s a 98% failure rate. Not only that, but of the ones that survive, 30% are effected by various debilitating conditions.
Clearly, cloning human beings under such low success rates and unpredictable results in unethical to put it mildly. But there is another component as well–that of human mental and psychological development. We cannot know for certain, for example, how a human clone’s intellect and mood would be effected by brain function and development.
Some scary scenarios straight out of Brave New World or 1984 are being currently proposed by some pro-cloning groups and individuals.
Future.Wikia.Com, for example, brushes aside the ethical debate altogether: “People who oppose human cloning are stuck in the past, have lost touch with the people, and cling on to obsolete ideals and morals that no longer exist in the new millenium.”
This sort of thinking is clearly devoid of all forethought, when even the majority of scientists currently working on cloning agree that human cloning is unethical in the current scientific conditions.
Some foresee human cloning supplanting sexual reproduction as the method of choice for procreation and view natural sexuality as a pure hedonistic pleasure. In such nefarious visions of the future, therapeutic cloning or regenerative medicine (growing organs for transplants and health-related concerns) are taken to the new levels in which “imperfections” of the body can be purged by cloning a more desirable component–a sort of new age of “plastic surgery” in cloning.
Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) was the first company to ever successfully clone early human embryos, which stopped at the six cell stage of development.
As recently has January 2008, Dr. Andrew Wood and Andrew French, chief scientific officer of Stemagen Corporation, announced that they successfully cloned five mature human embryos using DNA from adult skin cells. It was unclear whether or not the embryos would have lived, as they were destroyed in La Jolla, California’s Stemagen lab, since, claimed Dr. Wood, cloning human beings is unethical and illegal.
We are all fascinated by the topic–whether we believe it is a scientific achievement or an abomination of God’s natural order. We must ask though whether God would endow us with the ability to clone if He did not intend us to accrue such knowledge?
Until it is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that cloning a human being would be safe, ethical, and largely predictable, strong discretion should be used in employing such knowledge. Therefore we have the everlasting dilemna of choice: to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
It is unlikely that we will ever be able to effectively prove that full-scale human cloning can be done ethically, not because it is an abomination to God to do so if we had the ability; but because it is improbable that we will be able to predict the outcome.
