Courtesy: Medical Miracles, from Readers Digest 1981.
November.
From the frontiers of science and the far horizons of
personal courage, these stories of medical triumphs and miracles will reaffirm
your faith in the awesome powers of the human spirit. Dramatic victories and
human triumphs.
Selected and edited by the editors of Readers Digest
Take a cell, practically any cell, from your body, theory
goes, and through appropriate biological tinkering you can cause it to grow
into a duplicate of yourself—identical from eyelashes to toenails.
Science fact or science fiction? In the spring of 1978, a book was published
telling the supposedly true story of an elderly millionaire who, at great
expense, succeeded in producing a clone—an exact genetic copy of himself. According to the account, the clonal
offspring, now three years old, is living with his “father” in California.
The book caused a small uproar. Clone movies and clone jokes sprang up
overnight. A group of scientists
demanded that the federal government disclose all the studies it has funded on
cloning and the related area of cell biology.
In May of 1978, Representative Paul Rogers [D., Fla.] chairman of the
House Subcommittee on Health and Environment, convinced hearing on the
subject. The author was conveniently
unable to appear. But some distinguished
biological researchers, including ClementL.Markert of Yale University and
Beatrice mintz of Fox Chase Institute for Cancer Research, offered their
opinion that the book was pure fantasy, a hoax.
They pointed out that cell researchers simply do not yet know enough to
bring off such a feat, even if they wanted to.
Yet the cloning story touched highly sensitive nerve. People began to realize that we are on the
threshold of a new era in the biosciences.
Said Liebe Cavalieri, a molecular biologist at New York’s
Sloan-Kettering Cancer research Institute, “Knowledge of genetic engineering in
emerging that allows scientists to tinker with, and change, the very stuff of
life.”
Ironically, cloning—asexual reproduction that results in
exact genetic duplicates of the original—is, to many of earth’s life forms,
both harmless and natural. When the
blob-like amoeba reproduces by splitting into two parts, for example it is
essentially cloning itself. Both halves
contain the same genetic blueprints; they are exactly alike.
The term derives from the Greek work ‘klon’, twig offshoot,
and the technique has been used for years to propagate plants. By placing a cutting from a twig of stem in
water until roots appear, then moving it to soil, horticulturists can produce a
tree of flower identical to the donor.
In short, a clone. More recently,
single cells have been taken from carrots—clones of the original—bypassing the
need for seeds and guaranteeing an identical plant every time.
At the very earliest stage, people too are clones—clones of
the fertilized egg. Egg and sperm merge
at conception to form a single cell, which like the amoeba will divide into
2,4,8, then growing cluster of individual cells—each containing the identical
genetic code of the original cell.
However, as the cells continue to divide and grow into an embryo, they
begin to specialize, have differentiated, into the many parts that make up a
human being. Only the needed part of the
code remains active; the rest is somehow mysteriously switched off. The presumption on which human cloning rests
is that all these cells, though now specialized, still contain exact copies of
the original set of genetic instructions needed to make an entire
individual—and could do so if a way is found to switch them back on.
If so, the recipe for cloning people should be quiet
simple—at least in theory. Here’s how it
would work; shortly after ovulation, an egg is removed from a woman’s Fallopian
tube. The cell nucleus, the part
containing the woman’s contribution to the new individual, is plucked out,
leaving a genetically blank state. Next
a single cell is obtained from a donor [male of female]—scraped from, say, the
skin. It will have in its nucleus the
entire line of coded instructions for assembling a new person, though only the
instructions for ‘skin’ may presently be operative. But once the nucleus is transplanted into the
enucleated egg, the cytoplasm—material surrounding the nucleus—should trigger
the whole code into action.
When the egg cell has divided a few times, it is placed into
the womb of a healthy woman [not necessarily the one from the egg was taken],
and incubated. Nine months later a
genetic duplicate of the cell donor is born—same sex, same physical and mental
potentials. The donor and the baby clone
are, in effect, identical twins, differing only in age.
Although it may look easy on paper, it isn’t in
practice. To date the only authenticated
successful cloning experiments using, this method have been on frogs—using
cells taken from tadpoles [equivalent in development to human embryos]. This suggests that the experiments worked
only because the cells were not yet fully specialized. Said Professor Markert, “It is possible that
once a cell has fully specialized, it is irreversibly changed. If so, adult human cloning may never be
possible”.
If the only flesh-and-blood clones are a few laboratory
frogs why, then, all the fuss?
“Because,” said Jeremy Rifkin, co-director of a public-interest lobbying
group and co-author of the book ‘Who Should Play God?’, “the potential for
human cloning, no matter how far in the future, challenges our entire value
system. We must talk about the
implications now, before any crisis occurs,”
What would happen if human cloning became a reality? One favorite scenario is the creation of a
new breed of Hitlers—or Einsteins.
Scientists quickly disclaim the possibility. “It is more than genetic makeup that makes an
individual,” says Markert. “We are all
products of a particular historical era and of a special environment, with so
many minute things affecting the way we develop each and every day, even in the
womb, that a duplicate background—and therefore a duplicate individual—could
never be created.”
What would happen to the family, opponents of genetic
engineering ask, if the day comes when infants no longer owe their existence to
two biological parents? Markert does not
see this as a problem either. “Most men
and woman want their child to be an expression of them both. Even if the practice were ever possible,
there just wouldn’t be a big demand for it.”
But demand or not, there is no denying the serious moral
issues raised by the possibility of human cloning. As Representative Henry Waxman (D., Calif.)
stated, “The question is not can new life survive outside the laboratory, but
can our traditional values survive within it?”
The U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals ruled in 1978
that any corporation that creates a new form of life in the laboratory—in the
particular case, an “oil eating” bacteria for cleaning up oil spills—can patent
it. Does this mean that whoever is first
to clone a human can patent the process?
And is a clone then a possession, a product? What would be its legal rights? Could you keep it on hand like a robot, to do
the dishes or go to the office—maybe even use it for spare parts?
Some of these dilemmas could be solved by legally defining a
clone as a human, according it all the same rights and protections. Even so, questions of attitude and acceptance
remain. Wouldn’t a clone, though a human
in every legal and biological sense of the word, always be considered
“different”? What would such an attitude
do to the clone? Would the uncertain
status make him or her, though physically perfect, a psychological cripple,
unable to function in our society? What
then? Do we discard, like faulty
merchandise, this life we have created?
There are, of course, no easy answers.
With so many potentials problems, perhaps cloning research
should be banned. “But this is not a
theneque developed for reproductive purposes,” argued Robert G. McConnell,
professor of genetics and cell biology at the University of Minnesota. “It is a tool for achieving a new
understanding of biology at the most fundamental level,” adds Beatrice Mintz,
“our objective is not to try to clone a human being, but to cure human
disease.”
Already biologists studying the cell’s inner workings and
the various methods of cloning have made discoveries that may ultimately led to
breakthroughs in the fight against cancer, control of the aging process, and
the conquest of more than 100 presently incurable human genetic diseases.
Cloning may also bring about new strains of livestock. At Yale, for example, Markert is working
toward the cloning of such animals as cattle and pigs.
“The potential benefits are enormous,” he said. “You could
take cows lime Holsteins that produce a lot of milk and cross them with cattle
are hardly in the tropics. When you get
a superior animal with the best qualities of both, you clone it. And you could have a new, precisely
engineered strain of cattle—a boon to many third-world nations—within two of
three years, rather than centuries, as with selective breeding.”
To restrict cloning-related research would mean closing the
door on an important area of knowledge.
To continue to probe the secrets of the cell, however, it perhaps to
uncover the secret of human cloning.
And, given a nature of man, if it can be done it will be done. What then is the answer?
Said Congressman Rogers: “It is clear that human cloning is
not yet possible. The day when it will
be—if ever—is far off. For now, at
least, the benefits of cell-biology research outweigh the risks.”
In sum, the horse may never get out of the stable. In fact there may not be a horse in there in
the first place. But we should keep an
eye on the barn door anyway. As Rogers
put it, ‘One can always be surprised.”
