The promises and limits of cloning

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): Decades ago, the late, great Isaac Asimov (1920 to 1992), a Russian-born American scientist and prolific writer, coauthored a doggerel verse with Randall Garrett, which reads as follows:

Oh, give me a clone

Of my own flesh and blood

With its Y chromosome changed into X

And when it is grown

Then my own little clone

Will be one of the opposite sex.

This piece was written long before the advancement of cloning technology and before there was any sign that scientists were toying with the idea of animal cloning. Cloning was, at that time, practiced only in horticulture and the word clone (derived from the Greek word klon) meant twig, a plant clipping which has taken root after being planted in moist soil.

Garrett's amusing verse still suits the dizzying mood surrounding cloning today. It was Ian Wilmut, Keith H.S. Campbell and their colleagues at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland, who announced in February 1997 that they had made a successful clone. After the group's success in cloning a lamb, Dolly, from an adult sheep, several other groups launched ideas about cloning humans.

The first company to embrace human cloning was Valiant Ventures, which has its headquarters in the Bahamas. According to Tim Beardsley (Scientific American, May 1997, p. 10), within two weeks the company announced that it would build a laboratory to clone people willing to pay. The Raelian Movement, a self-styled religious organization, had founded the company for this very purpose. This announcement was soon followed by other statements, some expressing support, but most opposing the idea.

The most heated debate is, of course, the one between those who look at cloning purely from a biotechnological point of view and those who examine the question solely from a religious point of view. It should not be forgotten, however, that even among bioethicists views differ in this regard.

Arthur Caplan, of the University of Pennsylvania, condemns the Valiant Ventures plan, fearing that any attempts toward human cloning would produce some dead babies and defective human beings before succeeding in delivering a normal, live one. He suggests that anyone attempting such a project should be arrested.

Wilmut maintains that, generally speaking, there are no ethical grounds to justify duplicating existing humans. He even opposes allowing a couple to copy a child in order to get a source of tissue to save its life. The only human cloning he would condone is "copying an embryo to avoid genetic disease caused by mutations in mitochondrial DNA, which can cause devastating afflictions, including blindness."

John C. Fletcher, of the University of Virginia, believes that society might find it acceptable for a couple to replace a dying child or for a couple with an infertile partner to clone a child from either partner. The widespread squeamishness toward embryo research suggests, however, that Fletcher may, for now, be in a minority.

According to scientists, the heated controversy developing around human cloning has been caused by a wrong understanding of cloning. Scientific American's editor in chief, John Rennie, mentioned two wrong beliefs about cloning that are at the moment circulating in society. One is the belief that cloning results in exact copies of the donor. The other is the belief that cloning is a well-established technology, fully ready for use on human cells.

It is on the basis of these two beliefs that has caused people to jump to the wrong conclusion; that human cloning is possible and harmless and, in some cases, even desirable.According to scientists, no cloning ever produces exact copies of the donor. No cloned rosebush can be expected to be a "carbon copy of its parent, down to the arrangements of its thorns", said Rennie. Thus, it would be equally wrong to expect human clones to be exact duplicates of the parents in the infinite variety of personal characteristics.

Peter G. Brown, editor of The Sciences, said a cloned person -- assuming human cloning could be done -- would be no more and no less than a "time-shifted identical twins of its donor". The environmental differences between the donor and the clone, so central to their ultimate character development, could be at least as great as the ones affecting identical twins reared apart.

Those differences would include, according to Peter Brown, the reasons why a cloned child's parent(s) chose to procreate by cloning. This would undoubtedly affect the child's psychological development. Another environmental difference would be discrimination. Would a cloned child be accepted by the "sexually reproduced" children, which would constitute the majority, as their equal? How much "clonism" would such a child be able to endure? For reasons like these there is no guarantee whatsoever that a cloned child would develop into an adult human being that would satisfy the dreams of the person who "created" him or her.

Another important fact to be considered in this regard is that the level of the art of cloning technology is not as well- established as imagined by the public.

Wilmut points out that more than half the cloned sheep pregnancies he initiated failed to develop to term. Some had abnormalities. And three out of eight cloned lambs died soon after birth. Moreover, it took 227 attempts to produce Dolly from an adult cell. On the basis of such experiences it is, from the scientific point of view, extremely dangerous at the moment to make the jump from animal cloning to human cloning.

But above and over all the scientific and technological constraints just mentioned, human cloning faces a still bigger problem, that of human ethics. The central question here is the extent to which human beings can be permitted to tamper with human lives. As mentioned above, even among bioethicists opinions differ in this regard. Until today the debate on-going.

The debate on human cloning is more heated, in my opinion, than the debate on euthanasia. And these two issues -- human cloning and euthanasia -- are in my view not unrelated. Both are related with the question of the right to make human intervention in human lives. Whereas in euthanasia the issue is the right of physicians to help other human beings to terminate their life, in human cloning, the issue is whether it is permissible for biotechnologists to initiate or "procreate" human lives.

Rennie argues that cloning "won't replace the more time- honored methods of reproduction: it's not as much fun, and it's a lot more expensive." Only those with an excess of money and vanity would be interested in the idea of copying humans.