Exposing the Hype

The world was changed greatly on February 27, 1997, when a historic scientific paper by Dr. Ian Wilmut and Dr. Keith Campbell, from Scotland, appeared in the prestigious scientific journal Nature . Dr. Wilmut was able to take an adult cell from the mammary gland of a sheep, inject it into an enucleated egg of another sheep, and produce a genetically identical copy of the “donor” adult sheep, i.e., a clone (see figure below). Until this time, cloning was only considered a science-fiction speculation, the basis of some humorous movies, as well as the bloodcurdling movie The Boys from Brazil , in which the archvillain, Adolf Hitler, was cloned. However, nobody really took cloning seriously until Professor Wilmut’s extraordinary paper in 1997. There has been enormous and frankly misleading hype about both cloning and stem cells (inextricably related) from scientists looking for funding, politicians looking for votes, and journalists looking for copy. In this chapter I will try to clarify the confusion for you and set things straight.

The genetic material in each one of our ten trillion cells is identical to the genetic material that originally came from our mother’s single fertilized egg when we were just a one-cell embryo. However, the specific genes regulating the various specific tissues of our body get turned on or turned off as we develop from an embryo into an adult. It is assumed that these turned-off genes do not turn back on again, and therefore, it would be impossible to use the nucleus from any of our adult cells to create a totipotent embryo that would result in an identical copy of ourselves.

Experiments going back as far as fifty years did demonstrate that cloning could be done from adult frogs, but this only resulted in tadpoles. Those tadpoles always died and could never develop into mature frogs. Otherwise, before 1997, there had never been successful cloning of any animal using adult cells. Wilmut’s study, however, suggested that if you culture adult cells for five days in a “starvation” medium (i.e., culture medium that is deprived of protein or serum), these cells become quiescent, and the DNA can then undergo epigenetic reprogramming by the enucleated egg. Dr. Wilmut postulated that during starvation, the donor cells exit from the growth cycle and enter what scientists call the G-0 phase of the cell cycle. During this phase, nothing actually is happening metabolically inside the cell. The nucleus of such a starved cell can be inserted into an enucleated egg, and a normal embryo ought to develop, the DNA content being identical to that of the adult cell from which the nucleus was obtained.

This concept seems so simple, and the microinjection techniques so readily available in many of the best IVF programs in the world, including ours, that most of us were very frightened by this awesome suggestion. Many of us in the field felt that, if we wished, we could easily do these very same manipulations on human eggs with adult human cells. But we thought, “Who would want to?” In fact, one fringe character startled the world with the announcement that he would soon be opening up a cloning clinic. This exacerbated the fear that most of us in the field were already feeling, that this was a technology that would be easy to institute, and ethically had terrible implications. In fact there continued to be periodic apocryphal announcements of successful human cloning, by certain religious cults and fringe doctors ferociously competing with each other for news coverage. A gullible public feeds on these recurrent myths.

Yet in Dr. Campbell and Dr. Wilmut’s original paper in 1997, the clone, Dolly, was the only successfully cloned lamb out of 277 attempts. Everyone thought they had found the key to making cloning work, that it would just be a matter of time before the procedure became more efficient, and that greater and greater numbers of sheep and other animals would be cloned. However, the fact remains that although cloning has been extended to cows, mice, pigs, cats, and other animals, literally thousands of cloning attempts have to be made in any experimental species ever studied before even one viable clone is born. There are high rates of miscarriage, as well as stillbirths, in those animals that do become pregnant. Furthermore, most of the few live births die in the first week of life from a variety of congenital abnormalities. Even the health of Dolly is in question, since she died from a severe lung disease at only six years of age, which is very young for a sheep (and in fact that was the age of the adult whose cells were used in the experiment to actually make Dolly). Her adult donor lived a normal life span even though Dolly herself did not. In all animals in whom cloning has ever been attempted, the success rates have been dismal, and the abnormalities extensive. Thus, no legitimate scientists can really imagine any attempt, or any reason for an attempt, to clone humans.

However, this has not stopped publicity seekers and entrepreneurs from engaging in one wild and unsupported announcement after another, claims that the press, until recently, has been only too ready to uncritically proliferate. In fact, one bioethicist who is actually pro-cloning calls this the “media manipulation fraud of the century.” Scientists know that any attempt at reproductive cloning of humans would result in a vast amount of pain and suffering because of fetal abnormalities, miscarriages, and only the remotest chance it would be successful in a rare case. It is therefore a clear matter of understanding among all scientists and doctors that this would be completely unacceptable human experimentation, based on all the preliminary data on failure and fetal abnormalities found in cloning experiments in animals.

Reproductive cloning is not what scientists are interested in anyway. Scientists are interested in the possibility of using cloning technology, as well as stem cells, to cure diseases of cellular insufficiency, such as diabetes, Parkinson’s, bone-marrow deficiencies, and even certain forms of Alzheimer’s-type senile dementia.

Most people find it unthinkable that an individual would want to see him or herself reflected in another human being who is an identical copy. But in truth, if cloning were ever to be performed in humans, it would not result in the replication of an identical human being, but rather the delayed birth of an identical twin. Each human being is unique and different despite genetic similarity. The possibility of cloning humans, were it ever to be safe and medically reasonable, is as frightening to society as was Charles Darwin, who forced his contemporaries to take a completely new look at the creation of humans. In reality, Darwin did not threaten religion at all, and (he technology of cloning stem cells would not threaten humanity. As lan Wilmut said in 1997, “It doesn’t have anything to do with creating copies of human beings.… I just want to understand things.” The search for truth and the development of medical technology has never been a threat to our essential humanity, nor to our deepest religious convictions.

It was ludicrous to scientists and physicians that the national bioethics advisory committee hearing in December 2000 invited quacks and cultists to stir up absurd hype about cloning. It was a circus (paid for with taxpayer dollars) of a debate between scientists who really understood cloning and stem cell technology, and religious cult leaders and radical publicity seekers pretending to be on an equal intellectual level. It was like an unruly courtroom, but with no rules of evidence. The religious cult leaders talked about a man whose son was killed and who wanted the tissue of his son cloned so he could have his son back. Another was a retired physicist, who had no experience in either IVF or cloning technology, who was using this as a way of gaining recognition that he never had in his own field. Another was a European fringe fertility physician wishing to gain publicity to bring more patients to his clinic.

Why were political authorities so willing to sponsor, at taxpayers’ expense, such a silly debate between legitimate scientists on one hand and cultists on the other? My guess is that it’s not because politicians are that concerned about the obvious unacceptability of such a dangerous procedure medically, with all the suffering and misery that would result in abnormal births and miscarriages, or the false promises of immortalization and bringing back a dead son. In fact, the delayed birth of an identical twin (which is all that cloning really would be) is not equivalent to the danger of proliferation of nuclear weapons or biological warfare. It is not akin to the specter of widespread terrorism, which is readily possible in a complex society where weapons of mass destruction are so incredibly cheap and polarized hatred so ever present. The reason for the fear of cloning is not the fear of bad results. The fear is that cloning might work, requiring us to become philosophically introspective and possibly changing our vision of who we are.

In view of the emotional powder keg that cloning and stem cell technology has become, I’ll try now to give you an objective rundown of how this science has progressed in the last half century, since the first frog was cloned in 1952. I will demonstrate how the technology we are currently applying cannot lead to “designer babies,” but how the technology can someday help cure devastating diseases. Furthermore, if you are an infertility patient who requires IVF, you will need to understand this technology so that you can be aware of the possible implications of your having extra embryos frozen and saved for you as a result of your IVF procedure.