Brave New World? (Part 1 of 2)

August 2001 proved to be one of the most politically charged periods for reproductive technology, as ethicists, policy makers and scientists have offered their passionate opinions in the struggle to take control of its fate.

On Tuesday, a little over a week after cloning human embryos was legally banned within the United States, the typically staid meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington became the spotlight of a media circus. News crews and shouting replaced the normal procession of slide shows and civilized discussion as a small group of ostracized researchers announced that they would proceed with their efforts to clone a human being, despite ramifications within the scientific community. Meanwhile, the stem cell research battle also picked up steam, culminating in Bush's politically savvy funding announcement Thursday evening. Yet after the headlines recede, it is worth examining just how groundbreaking these events are and the political positioning involved, and what impact they really have on the progress of reproductive science.

Fear of Frankenstein: The Mad Science of Cloning

Unlike other sectors of reproductive technology, human cloning is generally met with universal fear, repulsion and ethical rejection by a variety of religious, political and philosophical perspectives that would not normally find themselves in agreement. This aversion towards anything associated with replicating humans stems from the belief that by intervening in traditional reproductive processes, science is entering into the inappropriate - and, of course, uncharted--territory of life creation.

Arguably, the fascination with such an attempt by science is found in the 200-year old legacy of Mary Shelly's unnamed creation in Frankenstein, a tragic attempt at a scientifically-engineered human being (who is subsequently referred to as a "monster"). However fantastic it was, Shelly's nameless "monster" conjures up the fear (and fascination) of medical progression gone too far, sentiments that have continued to fuel the cultural imagination. In his 1932 classic, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley depicted one of the most infamously bleak visions of reproductive technology, where cloned beings are designed to respond in obedient, subversive fashion. Although these references were not meant to be taken as scientific or technological prophecy but as social commentary, they fostered widespread misunderstanding--and ignorance--of cloning technology. "Human cloning has always been frightening, seductive--and completely out of reach," read the February 2001 Wired cloning cover story, (You)2, which then added, with great aplomb, "Not anymore."
Cloning human embryos for scientific research of any kind was banned by the House of Representatives in early August 2001, and the dramatic declaration by a small band of researchers at the National Academy of Sciences meeting on Tuesday was most likely in direct response to that action.

"I think one of the things they were trying to do was to position themselves politically between the vote in the House and the debate in the Senate, to put an image out there of a sort of mad scientist," says Whittier Law School Professor Judy Daar, who chairs the Los Angeles County Bar Bio Ethics Committee, and has authored several reports on reproductive bio ethics dilemmas. "It was a way of saying, 'Look if you ban this, we are here and we will do this and not under the strict research standards that we ordinarily would if we had funding and support in the US.' So I think there was political motivation for the timing."

The outraged reaction to these claims from within the scientific community was based mostly on the very imperfect and brief history of cloning animals, which of course started with the sensationalized cloning of Dolly the sheep by Scottish genetic engineer Ian Wilmut. Dolly, of course, in common with other animals cloned via the same process, has, for the most part, suffered from abnormalities as well as genetic defects. When this issue was posed last Tuesday to one of the researchers Dr. Severino Antinori of the University of Rome, his response was that the world was already "imperfect."

"That was pretty ghastly," says Daar. "I think that was the sort of nonscientific approach. They didn't have slides, They had no data. I think it was their way of telling the US, 'If you don't accept us and help us, we're here and we'll do it in a way that you won't necessarily be pleased with.'"

The highly-publicized conference also positioned these researchers as eccentric outcasts of the scientific community, with a lust for publicity that outweighed their claims to further fertilization technology. Their reputations were already considered questionable anyway. Antinori (whose partner is Dr. Pavos of The University of Kentucky) had attracted considerable criticism for his success in medically assisting a 67-year old woman with having a child. The other research group, Bahamas-based Clonaid, who call themselves the "first human cloning company," was founded by a group of investors and RAËL, the colorful leader of the Raelian Movement, an international religious organization which claims that, "life on Earth was created scientifically through DNA and genetic engineering by a human extraterrestrial race," and that, "Jesus was resurrected through an advanced cloning technique."

Yet with the attention this meeting garnered for the researchers--and their success in establishing their reputation as fringe or "mad" scientists--Tuesday's conference potentially had the even more damaging impact of stigmatizing the entire area of cloning, a research sector already besieged by skepticism, misinformation and political posturing.
"I think these scientists' reputations are already shot to hell," said Gus Koehler, of the California Research Bureau. "But I also think it's sort of branding everything in this area as bad. So they're poisoning the water for potentially good, established research that's moving along at an appropriate pace."

Some members of the reproductive science research community were already uneasy about the House ban on the cloning of human embryos. They felt it unfairly impinged upon highly important medical research. The ban, which carries fines of $1 million or more and up to 10 years in prison for violators of the law, was reached after much debate within the House over whether researchers should be allowed to make cloned embryos to obtain stem cells or "master" cells, that can turn into any type of cell in the human body. An amendment to the bill that would have allowed therapeutic cloning was also voted down, on the grounds that it would be too difficult to regulate human cloning once this type of research was made legal. Thomas Okarma, the CEO of Menlo Park-based biotech company Geron, was one of the researchers whose company works extensively in this area. Okarma attempted unsuccessfully to convince a congressional panel to stop the ban, arguing that such research could lead to cures for heart disease, liver damage and other life-threatening illnesses.

The magnitude of the mad science stigma that lingers over cloning could also grow significantly depending upon the actual outcome of Clonaid and Antinori's promises. The predictions for their success ran the gamut: there is no reason for them not to succeed, they will produce abnormal clones, they will be shut down, or nothing will come of it at all.

"We have been down this road before", says John L. Bishop, president of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine. "An announcement is made of an attempt to start an effort to clone a human being and too many in the public, the media and even policy makers take such an announcement too seriously."Announcing such a project has nothing to do with practicing medicine and everything to do with generating headlines, " he adds.

If the promises for cloning are even partially realized, the Huxley prophecies of designing an elite group of humans may be impeded only by the reality of the science itself, the rate of social and political acceptance, and economics.

"The evidence I look to for this, although it's not quite the same, is the history of all the technologies of artificial insemination by donor," says Whittier Law School professor Daar. "That wasn't an accepted technology until the mid 1950's, and even then there was a lot of hand wringing and a lot of these policy makers said it would lead to the decay of our society as we know it. Now it's a widely accepted practice and although cloning is different in significant ways, it ultimately won't be attractive to many people, it will not create this sort of sub group or superior group of human beings as has been proposed (and feared). The way in which parenting occurs today is based on a wide range of things that enhance the quality of a child's life and I think genetics may join the ranks of those sort of enhancements."

click here for Part 2 of 2

by Wendy Hall
larta Staff Writer