New York, NY — It's biology's Mt. Everest, and some say it could be climbed within a year.
Wired magazine in February predicted that scientists would produce the first human clone by early 2002 and fertility expert Severino Antinori in October said he would clone a human within months, while renegade embryologist Richard Seed says all he needs is 120 days and $300,000 to accomplish the feat.
So far, however, no clone has materialized. And experts say that despite apparent advances in animal cloning, a human clone is not likely any time soon — unless scientists are prepared to take huge ethical, political and scientific risks.
“We're a long way from cloning,” said Jamie Grifo, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology at New York University. “There are too many things that could go wrong.”
Until the Sept. 11 attacks, cloning — whether to reproduce a human being or to produce embryonic stem cells — was one of the nation's top stories, as the country grappled with the moral dilemmas inherent in the issue.
President George W. Bush in August warned of the dangers of “growing human beings for spare body parts.”
Now, as scientists struggle to come up with vaccines that might protect against old-fashioned diseases such as anthrax and smallpox, these futuristic scenarios appear, to many, remote.
Not, though, to cloning zealots, who claim success is close at hand.
Italian fertility specialist Antinori, who hit the headlines in 1994 when he helped a 62-year-old woman bear a child, says he can and will use cloning to help infertile couples have children.
Brigitte Boisselier, former deputy director of research at the Air Liquide Group, a French producer of industrial and medical gases, now heads a team of six scientists at a cloning company called Clonaid, which is registered under a different, undisclosed name in Wilmington, Delaware.
Boisselier, who is associated with a fringe religious organization that believes scientists from another planet created mankind, says her team is actively “preparing embryos” and expects to produce a human clone “soon.”
“Our next announcement will be when the baby is born,” she said. She won't reveal where her laboratory is, nor how far along she is with her cloning experiments, for fear of attack.
Human cloning is banned in most of Europe and a bill seeking to ban it in the U.S. is working its way through Congress.
Both Boisselier and Antinori say they hope to set up laboratories in the UK, after a high court there ruled earlier this month that human cloning experiments could not be legally banned.
That door may soon be closed to them though, as the British Parliament is poised to pass a bill to outlaw the cloning of babies with the intention of bringing them to term. The bill could become law within two weeks.
Boisselier and Antinori have said that if necessary they will conduct experiments on boats in international waters.
Antinori and Boisselier have been vilified by much of the medical community, but some mainstream scientists support their view that we have the technology — if not necessarily the desire — to create human clones.
“I think it's technically possible,” said Randy Jirtle, professor of radiation oncology at Duke University. “It could even be easier than cloning animals.” Jirtle conducted studies showing that one of the prime defects of cloned animals — excessive growth — would not be an issue, for genetic reasons, in humans.
Defects in cloned animals — cattle, mice and sheep — have provided opponents of human cloning with ammunition in their fight to have cloning banned.
According to the National Academy of Sciences, between 0.5 percent and 15 percent of cloned animals are successfully brought to term.
But a study released November 22 in the journal Science claimed greater success. The study concludes that 24 of 30 cloned cows were alive and apparently normal after one to four years. To achieve this number the scientists created 110 pregnancies — a success rate of 22 percent.
“All available scientific and medical data is suggesting these animals are perfectly normal,” said Robert Lanza, medical director of Advanced Cell Technology, the Massachusetts-based cloning company that sponsored the study.
It's these kind of statistics that hearten advocates of human cloning.
But Rudolf Jaenisch, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Medical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one of the nation's most outspoken opponents of human cloning, is skeptical of statistics showing animal cloning is safe.
“To say they are normal is not correct. They are normal by the criteria they used. These criteria are very superficial,” he said.
Whether or not cloned animals are normal, some scientists argue that it is beneficial to study them and to proceed with cloning research on humans in order to advance medical research.
“We can do the science, do the cloning, without making a baby,” New York University's Grifo said.
And then, they say, there's the simple desire of humans to extend the boundaries of knowledge, especially about what it means to be human.
“Having opened Pandora's Box with Dolly the sheep, it would be abnormal for humans not to want to look inside it,” Jirtle said.
For Jaenisch it's just this kind of unbridled curiosity that could lead to the production of dozens of deformed babies.
“There has been no progress whatsoever in understanding the scientific principal behind cloning,” he said.
(This article courtesy of Steven Ertelt and the Pro-Life Infonet email newsletter. For more information or to subscribe go to www.prolifeinfo.org or email infonet@prolifeinfo.org.)
