What Clinton X 2 fear the most is to be ignored. Perhaps we should do that.
Scarier:
latimes.com
WASHINGTON--A well-known Italian fertility specialist
and his U.S. colleague have announced plans to clone human
beings, apparently becoming the first scientists with
expertise in human reproduction to publicly set such a goal.
They may well succeed, cloning experts said
Saturday--but not without causing great damage.
Cloning would likely produce stillborn and diseased
children, they said, and might provoke lawmakers to seek
bans on a broad range of medical research, such as work that
uses tissue from human embryos to try to cure disease.
The two scientists stressed that their cloning procedure
would be offered only to couples who cannot bear children
by other means.
"We are serious people and have a track record to show
for it," said Panayiotis M. Zavos, professor of reproductive
physiology at the University of Kentucky. "Cloning has
already been developed in animals. The genie is out of the
bottle. It's a matter of time when humans will apply it to
themselves, and we think this is best initiated by us . . . with
ethical guidelines and quality standards."
Zavos said he is working with an Italian researcher, Dr.
Severino Antinori, who has already pushed the boundaries
of fertility treatment by helping women become pregnant
well after menopause, including a 62-year-old woman.
The two men announced their plans Thursday at a
conference in Lexington, Ky., and Zavos said Saturday that
they had lined up 10 infertile patients who want to be
cloned and 10 other researchers who want to help. He
declined to name any. He said the work would be done in an
undisclosed foreign country.
Cloning experts said the announcement signals that the
technology has matured and that it is bound to force its way
onto the agenda of U.S. politicians and regulators. No federal
law bars cloning in the United States, although the Food and
Drug Administration has said anyone seeking to use it as a
reproductive tool for humans would need agency approval.
Cloning specialists said they feared Zavos and Antinori
might provoke a backlash against medical research by
raising fears that scientists have crossed ethical boundaries.
Indeed, the cloning announcement came at a sensitive
time: On Friday, President Bush expressed his personal
opposition to federal funding for research that uses tissue
from aborted fetuses. Bush's comments raised concern
among some scientists that he might try to thwart plans to
fund fetal- and embryo-cell research, which aims to cure
diabetes, Parkinson's disease and other ailments.
The cloning plan "just invites prohibitions across the
board that shuts down the very research we need to cure
disease," said Ronald Green, a Dartmouth College
bioethicist.
Equally worrisome to some researchers is that when
cloning fails, it often fails in gruesome ways. For every
successfully cloned cow, sheep or goat, dozens of others fail
to grow in the womb, die at childbirth or perish soon after
birth from deformities.
"As far as cloning a human being, it's definitely an
achievable feat--unsafe and unethical, but achievable with
the right resources and know-how," said Dr. Robert P. Lanza,
vice president of scientific development of Advanced Cell
Technology Inc. in Worcester, Mass., which has cloned cows
and goats. "Cloning is conceptually very simple, so someone
with the drive has a real chance of succeeding."
The problem, said Rudolph Jaenisch, a cloning expert at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is that "there will
very likely be defects, and this is very irresponsible."
Cloning is a process for creating a genetic duplicate of an
individual. Although the offspring may not look or behave
exactly like the parent, it has the same genes. In the four
years since the arrival of Dolly, the famous sheep and the
first cloned mammal, scientists have successfully cloned
cows, pigs, mice and other animals.
In cloning, scientists start with an egg cell. They remove
the egg's DNA, then insert DNA or even a whole cell from an
adult animal. It was a mammary cell from a 6-year-old ewe
that produced Dolly, but skin and other adult cells have also
been used.
When the process works, the egg cell begins dividing and
grows into an embryo. The embryo is then transferred to a
surrogate mother and grown to term, just as human
"test-tube" babies are produced at fertility clinics.
Scientists believe that cloning often fails because the
adult DNA retains some features of its former life as a
mammary cell, skin cell or other type of cell. It took 277
attempts to clone Dolly, which produced only 29 embryos
that could be transferred to a surrogate mother. A single one
grew to term and was born as Dolly.
Zavos, in an interview Saturday, said he was well aware
that many cloning efforts produce flawed embryos. But he
said existing techniques, and those he and his team hope to
develop soon, would give scientists the ability to determine
which embryos will grow successfully and which are bound
to fail.
"We are not out there and loose and ready to go," Zavos
said from his home in Lexington. "We are very much aware
of this. It will take some experimentation to get to where we
need to go."
But he added that his goal was to develop viable, cloned
human embryos within 18 months or two years.
Zavos said he and Antinori would hold an international
meeting in Rome in March to consider ethical guidelines and
to continue working out their plan.
He noted that many people in the field believe that rogue
researchers are already working on human cloning and that
they may attempt to sell their services to wealthy people
who want to clone out of vanity or as "investors who want to
make another Michael Jordan."
Zavos, 56, said he has known Antinori for 15 years and
began talking with him about the cloning project in 1988.
Zavos is the president of ZDL Inc., a private corporation that
markets infertility products. Government records show that
Zavos has been granted four patents in the last decade on
laboratory devices and techniques.
Antinori is the director of a Rome-based artificial
insemination clinic. He attracted international attention
when he treated a 62-year-old woman with hormones so she
could conceive. She gave birth to a boy in July 1994.
Along with his ongoing work in helping older women
become pregnant, he has pioneered a technique to aid
sterile men by cultivating their nascent sperm cells inside
the testicles of mice.
Antinori could not be reached for comment, but the
Lexington Herald-Leader reported Friday that he had
acknowledged his role in the cloning announcement at the
conference Thursday.
The scientists' announcement came days after British
lawmakers approved human cloning for medical purposes.
That work reflects the hope that cloning can be used to
produce tissues for transplantation into patients. It
envisions that patients would be cloned and the resulting
embryos grown for several days. Then, scientists would
extract the embryo's stem cells, the so-called master cells
that can become any type of tissue in the body.
The stem cells would be grown into new pancreatic cells
for diabetics, nerve cells for spinal injury victims or brain
cells for people with Parkinson's disease.
Scientists say this would bypass a serious problem in
many transplants, in which the patient rejects the new
tissues or organ as "foreign" material. Cloned tissue is
thought to be more readily accepted by the patient's body.
Still, the process of cloning human embryos for medical
purposes could yield information that would help make it a
viable technique for reproduction, specialists said.
"There are many teams in the world that are on this
project, so I don't think [Zavos] is the only one," said Lanza.
"There are groups in China, Europe, the United States,
though very few who are thinking of using this to generate
identical human beings. Most reputable scientists believe
that is crossing an ethical line." |
