With cloning success comes some trouble

By ELLIS HENICAN

LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY

If Dolly weren’t dead already, she’d be awfully proud today.

She got a brand-new baby brother. Or was it a cousin? Or a nephew twice-removed? In the brave new world of genetic cloning, the terminology is still a little confused.

But this much is certain: The first cloned mammal ever, created in 1996 from the mammary cells of a Finn Dorset sheep and named for curvaceous country singer Dolly Parton, can now gaze proudly from that Great Meadow in the Sky.

Dolly was euthanized in 2003 on account of an illness unrelated to the cloning. But the promise she symbolized and the challenge she raised both live grandly, unmistakably, inevitably on.

And lots of people thought this day would never arrive.

But a scientist-CEO at a small, private lab in California soldiered on. His name is Sam Wood. His company is Stemagen. Not so long ago, he scraped some cells from his arm and injected them into human female eggs that had been treated to remove their own genetic material. He let the cells grow in there for just eight days.

Voila!

Independent tests showed that these developing embryos carried Wood’s unique DNA. Yep, he’d created the earliest precursor of a little baby Sammy, concocted straight from the cells of the grown-up one.

Destroyed embryos

Wood destroyed the embryos before they could grow up and start demanding $200 sneakers or money for college tuition. But had the little clones been allowed to grow and then implanted in a uterus — who knows? They truly might have become living, breathing genetic replicas of the scientist himself.

“We believe that this is the future,” he said Thursday, less the proud papa than the proud scientist.

He wasn’t talking little Sammys. Not yet anyway.

He was talking about the promise of humans to create “patient-specific stem cells” — the raw material for all of the body’s specialized tissues from heart to muscle and more.

These stem cells, he said, are “the holy grail,” which scientists will use to cure juvenile diabetes, spinal-cord injuries, MS, Parkinson’s disease and who knows what other dreadful human ailments.

But you can already hear the bleating — and I don’t just mean the ovine kind.

The anti-stem-cell absolutists, with President George W. Bush on their side, were moving anew to stop the research. The science-fiction nut jobs were imagining cloned armies of human killing machines. Lab entrepreneurs in Korea, China, England and elsewhere were suddenly worried that their precious head start on cloning technology was about to be snatched back by a few forward-looking biotech researchers in the United States.

It’s at times like these that we always turn to Art Caplan.

“The evil arm implication is blown way out of proportion,” said Caplan, who heads the department of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania and is known for discussing complex issues in relatively plain English. “If you want an evil army, it’s a whole lot faster to hire one than to grow one.”

Cloning, of course, just creates genetic matches. It’ll never account for experience, upbringing and a thousand other social influences. “Then when you tell the cloned kid what to do, the first thing the kid will tell you is, ‘I don’t want to do that.”’

But the stem-cell possibilities of cloning, he said, really are huge. Despite recent advances in adult stem cells, the chance to build from scratch still offers huge advantages, Caplan said. “These are stem cells you can turn into a body repair kit just for you. Table for one! Cloned, it’s me!”

There are still big challenges ahead. The biggest: If there’s a huge new demand for cloned stem cells, where will all the eggs come from?

“Every time you clone, you need eggs,” Caplan said. “If this catches on, where will hundreds of thousands of eggs come from? What are the ethical implications there?”

Surely, Dolly never wrestled with anything so complicated.

X Ellis Henican is a columnist for Newsday. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.