Cloning's Kevorkian

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It was probably inevitable that a maverick like Richard Seed would emerge from the shadowy fringes of science to champion the cause of human cloning. Yet when Seed trotted out his scheme to open a commercial cloning clinic in the Chicago area, the world reacted with stunned surprise. President Clinton blasted the idea as "untested and unsafe and morally unacceptable." Experts questioned whether the 69-year-old physicist was capable of carrying out such an ambitious undertaking. Said University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan: "He has as much chance of cloning a human as my Uncle Morty does."

Who is Richard Seed? That's what everyone wanted to know last week, as reporters and camera crews chased the eccentric scientist from one TV studio to another. Gradually, the story of a strange and erratic life emerged, for this oversize man--who looks like an Old Testament prophet--is both brilliant and bizarre.

The son of a surgeon, Seed grew up in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, where he was, by his own description, the most unpopular student in his high school. Why? "The same reason I'm unpopular here," he says. "I was loquacious, overly intelligent, well educated. I knew too much about too many things, and that angered other people." Seed graduated cum laude from Harvard and received a Ph.D. in physics in 1953. Soon, though, his interests shifted, and he began exploring the new frontier of biomedicine. In the 1970s Seed co-founded a company that commercialized a technique for transferring embryos in cattle. Later, he and his brother, Chicago surgeon Randolph Seed, started another company to help infertile women conceive children using the same technique.

The new company, Fertility & Genetics Research Inc., seemed promising. But the procedure was cumbersome--it involved flushing embryos out of the uterus of the egg donor--and was soon eclipsed by in-vitro fertilization. Ultimately the venture failed. Indeed, Seed in recent years appears to have suffered some financial reversals. Until last summer he and his third wife Gloria lived in a two-story Victorian house in Oak Park. But the bank foreclosed on their $341,000 mortgage, and they were forced to move to a modest bungalow in nearby Riverside. "I had a beautiful house," sighs Seed. "It's very difficult to make money but extremely easy to lose it. I lost a couple of million dollars."

People who know Seed have strong reactions to him, positive and negative. The Rev. Thomas Cross, Seed's pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Oak Park, believes his interest in cloning is an extension of his Christian charity. "He's committed to human well-being," Cross says. "He's doing this out of compassion."

Former neighbor Barbara Moline sees Seed in a different light. "He started conversations by telling you he deserved to be a Nobel prizewinner," she remembers. He was always dreaming up new crusades, she says. A few years ago, Seed invited Moline to invest $75,000 in his project to cure AIDS. Last summer he asked if the church could donate space to help support his cloning research. For Seed, Moline believes, cloning represents a "last, desperate attempt to become rich and famous. He wanted to make it big, but he never did."