“(You)2” is the clever headline of Brian Alexander's fascinating trip through the human-cloning underground, where only slightly mad scientists with no qualms about cloning humans are already being besieged by people who desperately want them to whip them up a new son, a new daughter or a new self.
Alexander's piece makes a convincing case that human cloning, no matter how the moral/legal argument is settled, is inevitable. A market for human clones is forming, as a visit to humancloning.org attests. Demand is already high and supply soon will be forthcoming.
As Alexander explains, the science is a breeze. Inserting the nucleus of a cell taken from the skin of a dead son into a fresh human egg and fixing it to a womb is almost as routine as cloning mice, sheep, cows, goats and pigs. All that is needed, he says, is the cash, the will and some clinical trials.
Oh, the initial shock will be major, Alexander says. But “not because human cloning will be as terrible and disruptive as widely assumed. But because we will realize that most of our ideas about it were all wrong, that the cloning fostered by our imaginations and nightmares doesn't really exist.”
For one thing, cloning doesn't create perfect copies. Cloning a basketball team of sons from Michael Jordan's DNA and inserting the egg into the wombs of five mothers, for example, won't create five baby future superstars.
We'll get used to human cloning, Anderson confidently predicts, just as we got used to test-tube babies, which are now “born” in in-vitro-fertilization clinics by the thousands each year. What might take a little getting used to, however, will be human beings designed from scratch.
Work on artificial human eggs, sperm and wombs is moving along nicely and artificial human chromosomes were developed four years ago.
“So,” concludes Anderson, “it doesn't take much of a leap to imagine a time when a mother and father, one of whom caries a gene that makes cancer more likely … enter the IVF clinic to design a baby who will not get these diseases. And maybe the child will be a little taller and smarter too.”
If you think Wired has gone off a wacky deep end again, or that all this gene-and-cell manipulation is only good for bad movie plots, check out “Charlotte's Goat” in the Feb. 19 Forbes.
It explains how a company called Nexia Biotechnologies used transgenics (the controversial science of inter-species gene splicing) to combine the chromosomes of an orb weaver spider with those of a goat so that the she-goat they create is able to make one of world's strongest materials in her mammary glands.
This is not science-fiction, it is good-old American profit-seeking. Thanks to the spider's silk-making genes, the goat's milk, when dried and purified, can be spun into a tough, lightweight thread three times tougher than Kevlar. It's such a success, Forbes reports, that Nexia is planning to try it on cows.
(For more on the cloning issue click here.)
(This article can also be found on WorldNetDaily.com).
