Ian Wilmut: Breaking The Clone Barrier

In

the closing years of this millennium, a quiet, unassuming British embryologist named Ian Wilmut set out to improve the productivity of farm animals and along the way set off a biological earthquake. The experiment he tenaciously pursued--to get a cell from an adult mammal to behave like a cell from a developing embryo--had long since been abandoned at the major centers of scientific research. Even high school biology students knew that once a mammalian cell had differentiated, and was programmed by nature to be bone or nerve or skin, it could not be deprogrammed.

Yet Wilmut did it. From a single mammary cell, taken from an adult ewe, he and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute cloned a sheep called Dolly and introduced her to a skeptical world in February 1997.

Perhaps it was his isolation in a rural part of Scotland (the bucolic region of Midlothian, where he and his wife treasured long walks, gardening and the distinctive Scottish sport of curling) that permitted him to resist the naysayers. Or perhaps it was the isolation of the remote field of animal husbandry that fostered his originality.

In any event, he seemed as surprised as anyone else that his modest and eerily simple experiment, conducted with limited funding, should have as much impact on our sense of what it is to be human as anything since Adam and Eve. Wilmut wanted to use his cloning technology to improve livestock. "I think we should trust the farmers," he said. Any experimentation with humans, he believed, should be kept strictly at the level of cells and proteins. It would be ethically unacceptable, he said, to use his technique to create a human clone.

That, however, was the very thing that caught the world's imagination. Human cloning! The stuff of science fiction seemed about to become reality. Even before other labs had confirmed Wilmut's discovery, a Harvard-trained physicist named Richard Seed proclaimed his intention to clone humans for commercial purposes. Cloning, he declared grandiosely, was "the first serious step toward becoming one with God."

Few scientists found Seed's sound bites credible, yet his proclamations laid out a soul-shivering truth. Medicine has a strong impetus (if not temptation) to use this technology--for basic research, for new therapies, to provide solutions to infertility or to "replace" a dying loved one. But medicine is also bound by the traditional precept to do no harm, and so it takes on added challenges--such as whether clones will die young because of their older dna or whether they will suffer the environmental mutations picked up during the life of their adult parent.

Dolly shakes our ethical foundations, our social norms, even our religious beliefs. What is the role of clones in society? Are they an asexual variant on incest? Can they become human slaves or organ donors? Who are their parents? Who is their family? Are they made in God's image or in man's?

Human cloning is too profound to be undertaken without the broadest possible understanding of its implications for our culture, our traditions, our values, our laws and the future of the human gene pool. But it's not easy to talk about Dolly in a world that doesn't share a uniform set of ethical values and where it often seems that anything goes. Israel, Australia, China and most European countries have prohibited human cloning. Other countries, like the U.S., have not.

What makes this challenge even more difficult is that Dolly is not terribly real for most people. The very strangeness of her origin makes it seem abstract and irrelevant to everyday lives. Will cloning be a technology of the very wealthy and the depraved, sneaking up on the rest of the world without its understanding? Perhaps, like nuclear warfare or human eugenics, the full meaning of cloning will be felt only when we get a taste of its abuse.

Do we wait for the first human infant to be produced, in secret, by a Richard Seed or his offshore equivalent? Ian Wilmut, the soft-spoken scientist who started this noisy revolution, says no. The father of three (one of them adopted), he speaks passionately of honoring the individuality of the child. Human cloning, he says, should be banned.

Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former director of the nih, is dean of the College of Medicine and Public Health at Ohio State University