Cloning's Kevorkian

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...