Cloning of animals certainly, humans quite probably. It’s going to be as much
part of our future as aeroplanes and antibiotics are part of our present. But
when pushed most people admit that they are ignorant about the fundamentals of
cloning.
That’s hardly surprising.
Dolly, the first ever clone of an adult mammal, trotted into the limelight
little more than a year ago. The very concept was so mind-boggling that some
biologists found themselves checking the calendar to make sure it wasn’t an
April fool joke. It wasn’t. There followed months of sometimes anguished debate
and speculation, as people struggled to work out just what this meant—for
human psychology, sex, religion, disease, agriculture, society, and for
themselves. The questions threatened to overwhelm us. Stopping to examine how
scientists pulled off the trick, or to assess the progress being made in
post-Dolly cloning research, seemed less important.
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Now everyone has had time to come to terms with Dolly, we’re taking a fresh
look at the science behind cloning, and what directions the technology is likely
to go in.
For this special report, we asked the experts to settle some of those
niggling questions. Why clone sheep anyway? What’s to stop someone trying to
clone me? And how would you go about developing the technology to clone humans?
(“We Ask, They Answer” p 26).
We also got eyeball to eyeball with Dolly. Is it possible she isn’t a clone
of an adult sheep at all, as some experts argue? Or has the Scottish research
team that produced her every reason to be confident in their creation?
(“Clone Alone” p 32).
Finally, we look at one particularly harrowing view of where the recent
breakthroughs in reproductive technology could lead—not in the next year,
or the next decade, but maybe later next century. It’s not cloning itself we
should be worrying about, the argument goes, but its sister technology genetic
engineering. The frightening result could be the almost accidental emergence of
an entirely new human species
(“Us and Them” p 36).
So welcome to the clone zone. Everything you wanted to know about cloning but
were afraid to ask.
