Ten Years Since Dolly...

Art Caplan writes in MSNBC:

Ten years ago today, the birth of the first cloned mammal - a sweet-faced sheep named Dolly - was announced to the world. Her creators, a team of veterinary scientists at Scotland's Roslin Institute, approached their landmark scientific achievement with a sense of humor: They named the lamb after Dolly Parton. (The DNA they used to clone her came from a breast cell.) Much of the rest of the world, however, was not amused.

Dolly's creation set off a storm of fear, confusion, misunderstanding, pandering and double-talk that culminated in the greatest fraud ever perpetrated in the history of biomedicine - the false claim that a South Korean scientist had cloned human embryos and made stem cells from them.

Dolly's creators were so giddy because they had demonstrated it was possible to reactivate all the genes in a cell taken from an adult mammal. They made a grown-up cell act like a kid again.

At the time, almost no scientist thought cloning was possible from the DNA of adult animals. Cloning had already been accomplished in tadpoles and by using embryonic cells, but science dogma held that once a cell had grown up and become specialized - by turning into a skin cell, a hair follicle or a breast cell, for instance - its DNA was through. There was no way to get that DNA to switch on again and act like an embryo.

What intrigued scientists about Dolly had little to do with what captivated the rest of humanity. The main preoccupation of religious, philosophical and social commentators 10 years ago was how rapidly Dolly would be followed by the creation of a human clone who would destroy the world.

So, where are these clone armies?
In the weeks following Dolly's announcement, mainstream media reports were full of irresponsible speculations by all sorts of experts and "authorities" on what Dolly's birth meant for you and me.

Some worried that cloning would lead fiendish dictators to create armies of clones bred for war. Others fussed that the rich and egomaniacal would seek to create clones of themselves so they could live forever. Still others warned that clones would serve as mobile spare-parts farms. Need a liver or a kidney? Just carve out your clone's and off you go, good as new. And what about cloners resurrecting the dead from bits of DNA found at museums, graveyards and churches?

All this nutty speculation led to a worldwide panic about biological engineering as seen before only in Hollywood films from the 1950s such as "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman." Presidents, popes and potentates across the globe went bonkers warning us against human cloning. Laws forbidding human cloning - which were premature at best, since the chances of producing a human clone hard on the heels of Dolly's birth were, as I tried to point out at the time, next to nothing - were proposed left and right.

Then it got truly scary. Because that's when the cavalcade of cloning kooks came out.

Bring in the clowns
The parade was led by the felicitously named Richard Seed, a physicist who announced in December 1997 that he intended to clone the first human being. Anchors and talking heads everywhere granted Seed a worldwide platform to babble on about his plan to use cloning to bring humans closer to God. Seed was soon followed in his "I will clone and you cannot stop me" mania by Kentucky fertility expert Panayiotis Zavos and maverick Italian fertility doctor Severino Antinori, best known for helping a 62-year-old woman become pregnant. For a time these two teamed up and proposed setting up a cloning operation on a boat in international waters.

These characters did their best to convince the world that they held the bottle in which the genie of cloning resided. The media and politicians lapped it up. But this gaggle of kooks paled in comparison to the arrival of the group forever linked in the minds of the world with human cloning: the Raelians.

The Raelians, a religious cult that believes extraterrestrials used genetic engineering to create life on Earth, secured a worldwide audience with their cloning threats.

In 2002, Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, a college chemistry professor, Raelian bishop and CEO of the sci-fi start-up Clonaid, along with Rael, the founder of the Raelians and a former French pop singer and race-car aficianado, announced to an aghast world press that Clonaid had successfully cloned a human being. Boisselier said that the mother delivered by Caesarean section somewhere outside the United States, and declared that both the mother and the little girl, Eve, were healthy.

Despite loads of fanfare and claims of a slew of additional clones, no DNA proof was ever offered up.

Why anyone would think that a chemist with a bad hair-dye job and a cult leader parading around in a Starfleet uniform had the scientific know-how and skills required for human cloning was not apparent. However, these two took over the airwaves for weeks. They also appeared as witnesses testifying about cloning in the U.S. Congress and before the National Academy of Sciences!

A perfect storm of nutty professors, kooky cultists and shameless self-promoters used the media to get their screwball message out: Human cloning was not only possible, it had been done and the frightening power of cloning resided perilously in the craziest hands on the planet.

Mainstream madness
Things were not going all that much better in mainstream science. The scientists who created Dolly got into a nasty dispute over who deserved credit for her creation.

Dolly herself got sick, was euthanized and wound up stuffed for a display at a museum in Scotland in 2003. Scientists worldwide managed to clone other species including mice, goats, pigs, cattle and rabbits but at a terrible price in terms of stillborn, sick and deformed animals.

But the biggest blow - to scientific integrity - was still to come. Scientists quickly recognized that cloning might be a useful way to take advantage of the embryonic stem cell discovered shortly after Dolly's birth, but with much less fanfare. Cloned embryos made from adult human cells might hold the key to technology capable of replacing worn-out or damaged human cells.

The drive to be the first to show that cloning human embryos was possible led to dubious announcements by a few scientists that they had made cloned embryos. The cloning race culminated in the whopping lie told to the world by South Korea's Hwang Woo-suk. In a fabricated paper published in May 2005 in the prestigious journal Science, he claimed to have cloned many human embryos and extracted stem cells from them.

Those who hated the prospect of any form of cloning - animal or human - and those who were morally horrified by the prospect of human embryonic stem cell research, including President Bush, Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., and Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, among others, proposed bills that would stop the strategy of "clone and kill." The tactics, incredibly, worked.

Public funding for embryonic stem cell research foundered on the legacy of fear built by nuts, the media, scientists bickering amongst themselves, fabricators and politicians who played the cloning card again and again.

So where does this dismal history leave cloning today?

Animal cloning has proven incredibly difficult. There are noises being made about introducing meat or milk from cloned animals into the food supply, but the economic practicality of that happening given how hard and expensive it is to clone animals makes this all talk. The huge risk of creating a dead or deformed baby has put all talk of human cloning firmly on the back burner. The fact that there still has been no successful cloning of a primate using Dolly-style techniques shows just how hard - or maybe, impossible - human cloning is.

Cloning for research is still of interest to scientists around the world, but no one has been able to make it work reliably.

The place where cloning continues to thrive is in Hollywood, TV and science fiction. There, clones are still mined for body parts, mad scientists can still gin up a possessed clone kid and evil dictators still create their clone armies to conquer the galaxy.

Ten years after the announcement of Dolly's creation, cloning is a subject that still scares most of us when all it really is is a new, very difficult, very inefficient and very tricky way to make a lamb.

Islamic Code of Ethics Includes Therapeutic Cloning

SciDev.Net reports on the new Islamic code of medical ethics up for a vote:

Muslim states are being asked to allow the cloning of human embryos for research into possible medical treatments — so-called therapeutic cloning — while maintaining a ban on the reproductive cloning of human beings. Both provisions are included in the draft text of what is being proposed as the first international Islamic code of medical and health ethics, approved during the eighth conference of the Islamic Organization for Medical Sciences (IOMS), held in Cairo last month. The proposed code addresses the relationships between physicians, their patients, and wider society from the perspectives of both Islam and medical ethics. It takes into account Islamic views on new medical techniques such as in vitro fertilisation and gene therapy.

Cloning Humans to Harvest Stem Cells

National Public Radio's Jennifer Luden speaks with NPR's Joe Palca about recent advances in the field of cloning, and talks about why bans on human cloning have not been enacted. -- Linda Glenn

The Enemy of My Enemy is ... My Enemy

Panos Zavos is on everyone's list of the top five, um, eccentrics in the human cloning race. He's fooled millions - twice - with promises that the first human clone's birth is imminent, and with preposterous claims about his own skills at cloning. He would be funny, if he weren't so dangerous. The emergence of Zavos has done more than anyone to convince the world that scientists who work with nuclear transfer are crazy. For example, today's British papers are all reporting that "cloning pioneer" Zavos is accusing Britain of "promoting infanticide." You'll love this:

[Zavos] branded UK rules governing reproduction as “super-conservative” and warned they were forcing many adults into having multiple abortions because it was illegal for them to choose the sex of their baby. He said British couples were visiting his clinic for “family balancing” treatments, having terminated a number of pregnancies because the gender of their unborn baby was not what they wanted. At the Kentucky Centre for Reproductive Medicine and IVF, where Zavos is associate director, treatments offered include pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, where the sex of embryos can be screened to ensure couples have a child of the desired sex.

You just know sex selection advocates want to stuff this guy into a small, dark closet ...

Keine Cloning

Germany's Ethics Council rejects cloning today. No doubt reacting in part to the last week's news about laws allowing embryo cloning research in Switzerland and Britain, the ethics group affirmed its previous position but did ask Germany's legislative body to discuss the matter again soon.

Now Come the Days of the Evil Clones of Death (UPDATED)

Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, revealed from Rome today that human cloning is "more dangerous than weapons of mass destruction." UPDATED: the Cardinal might soon become pope.

Kass Will Now Officially Say Anything

The Independent UK reports on Leon Kass' latest extraordinary statements. Kass is on the stump, although this time not so much for the President as against every nation that wants to do hES research using nuclear transfer. He is speaking on behalf of all the, um, yet to be created. "Britain is wrong. A woman's body should not be a laboratory for research or a factory for spare body parts. No child should be forced to say, 'My father or mother is an embryonic stem cell'." For what it is worth, there is no evidence that producing 5 day-old blastocyst-like organisms through nuclear transfer would make reproductive cloning any more likely to work. But the metaphor is great: little people alone and alienated, crying out "my mommy is a cell! my mommy is a cell!" The other members of the Presidential Bioethics Council must be so proud of this heroic effort.

Harvard Team Seeks to Clone Embryos

The Washington Post is reporting this morning - mistakenly as best one can determine - that Harvard is attempting to create the first cloned human embryos for medical research in the U.S. The piece mentions that UCSF tried and failed to harvest stem cells from embryos. But as early as 1996 a team at the University of Massachusetts was working on identifying cells for harvesting from cow-human embryos, whose nucleii were human, embryos which were created using somatic cell nuclear transfer. Previous reports of cloned human embryos from both China and Korea have also resulted, albeit much later and in one case in Chinese, in publications ... Weiss reports that another such attempt at ACT failed, but that misses the point: Harvard hasn't done it either, so the only news here is that someone ELSE is trying. The question of whether it can migrate into "the private sector" has already been answered! Rick Weiss reports that the group at Harvard is waiting on approval from Harvard's ethics "boards" by which he means IRBs, but as Rick knows very well the IRB doesn't review "ethics" in the sense in which he is describing "ethics boards." It's an important piece spun to be more important - and it illustrates the problem with creating accurate reporting about the most complex political issue to hit science in a long time.

Virginia Tech: "A Number": A Play about Human Cloning

A new play by Caryl Churchill that "dramatizes our anxieties about our individuality and identity that are stirred up by the looming possibility of cloning" will be premiered at a VT conference about human cloning on 10/28.