in Re: your posted views:
You should volunteer for this...
wirednews.com
(You)2
Human cloning has always been frightening, seductive - and completely out of reach. Not anymore.
By Brian Alexander
In four hours, the Creator will ask me for $100,000 to help finance the cloning of a dead man. But by then, he'll have swallowed too much alcohol, driven us recklessly around the city in his sports car, and tried and failed to pick up a waitress. So I'll be accustomed to a little flamboyance from him, and his strange request will seem like ordinary conversation.
Right now, though, we're just starting dinner when he spells out his desire to be the first scientist in history to clone a human being. "This will be the biggest leap for mankind," he says. "It is the central core of Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus, the promise of eternal life!" The Creator, an intense, dark-haired man in his thirties, looks a little like Peter Lorre in The Beast With Five Fingers when he says this, so I have to remind myself that he's not a nut. He's a real scientist, a pretty good one, too, with a PhD in molecular biology, a list of peer-reviewed publications, and a research job at a big-name university. (Where, he says, he would be fired instantly if he went public with his human-cloning plans - hence his demand to remain anonymous.) The Creator conducts research on a protein that he was the first to identify, one that could have a tremendous impact on cardiovascular disease.
Tonight, he's not thinking about this work. Tonight, he's excited - thrilled, really - by the prospect of cloning a person. "This is the easiest thing you can do! You just get the damn nucleus, and put this damn nucleus into this enucleated oocyte, and pray to God something happens, and put it back into the surrogate mother, and wait. The easiest thing we could do right now, believe me, is to damn clone a human being!"
Other scientists have told me similar things, so I know it's plausible. Still, I'm skeptical that the Creator will get there first, because he's sounding a little too much like Richard Seed with this riff, too evangelistic and frenzied. Seed, you'll recall, was the retired veterinarian and physics PhD who gained brief notoriety in early 1998 by declaring his intention to clone humans and make us one with God, like so many seraphim.
Unlike Seed, the Creator has some of the skills necessary for cloning a human - namely, an advanced knowledge of cell biology and the ability to cultivate cells. He has never worked in cloning, but he has spent a great deal of time thinking about it. As a postdoc in 1990, long before the 1996 birth of Dolly the sheep - the first clone of an adult mammal - he correctly visualized how to remove the biggest obstacle to adult cloning: getting cells to revert to an embryonic state. His idea was to force cells into a kind of stasis before injecting them into eggs - the technique eventually adopted by Dolly's scientists. Davor Solter, a renowned cell biologist then at Philadelphia's Wistar Institute, tried to pull off such a reversion in the early 1980s, failed, and declared it impossible. The Creator tells me he knew Solter was wrong and tried to convince other researchers to take him into their labs. "They did not believe me because they had a paper by the very well-established scientist Davor Solter," he laments, "and who the hell was I?"
He reaches over his plate of shrimp to hand me a copy of his old research proposal, along with the polite brush-offs he got in response. This is proof, he says, that he was the real visionary all along. Now he wants his moment.
The Client may give him a chance to seize it. A businessman living in Western Europe, the Client lost his son to disease more than a year ago, but he had the foresight to keep tissue samples from the body. Following leads picked up from the human-cloning underground - an evolving worldwide network of people who communicate mostly online and who desperately want to see cloning happen - the Client contacted animal-cloning scientists to learn how these tissues should be preserved to yield usable cells when the time comes. Based on the experts' advice, he had tissue stored in both liquid nitrogen and paraffin blocks. Then the Client cruised the underground until he found the Creator.
When I call the Client, he's angry because he thinks the Creator revealed his name to me. He's obsessed with staying in the shadows, so I have to assure him several times that I found his name another way, and that I'll protect his identity. Eventually he confirms that, yes, "there is a plan. We are definitely going to proceed. We intend to go ahead. We are literally going to have our son back."
The plan goes like this: The Creator and the Client will fly to an in-vitro fertilization lab in one of Asia's largest cities, in a country that has no legal ban against cloning humans. The Creator says the lab's director is on board, and is skilled in the handling of human eggs and the IVF manipulations that closely resemble those used in cloning. The procedure will work like so: Nuclei will be taken out of eggs obtained from the clinic's regular donors. Then, in a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, the son's cells will be injected into the eggs. The eggs and cells will be fused together, and then the eggs will be activated to begin cell division. These embryos will be implanted into five to ten surrogate mothers in the hope that an egg will take hold and develop into a clone of the Client's son.
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Brian Alexander (alxander@pacbell.net) wrote about DNA microarrays in Wired 8.06.
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there is more on Page 2 (actually... 10 pages)
wirednews.com
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The Creator's spirit has been awakened by the historical moment we're in right now, a convergence of under-the-radar pro-cloning agitation, falling taboos, and the inexorable march of science. These spheres are overlapping so neatly that "human cloning could be done tomorrow," says Alan Trounson, an animal cloner and IVF clinician at Australia's Monash University.
Many animal cloners and in vitro fertilization experts are certain that a human has already been cloned in secret. |
