By Barry Serafin
 Experts
Say Human Cloning Is Inevitable, But Is It Ethical?
W A S H I
N G T O N — All babies are genetically unique — each
one is a biological extension of both parents.
But Kentucky
fertility specialist Panos Zavos wants to change all that. Zavos
and an international team of doctors say that within two year
and a half years, they will produce the world's first cloned baby.
He says the procedure would be offered only to infertile couples.
"We will clone a human for therapeutic purposes. That is
very important for people to know that," Zavos says. "This
is not just to clone anyone that wishes to do that."
Doug Dorner
and his wife, Nancy, are interested in cloning because cancer
treatment left Doug sterile.
"I don't
see any reason why technology can't help me to have a child,"
Doug says. "I think that cloning at this point would be a
good option because it would actually be one of us."
Dorner learned
about cloning from a Web site, www.humancloning.org The site is
run by the Human Cloning Institute, which was founded by Randolfe
Wicker.
Wicker sees
cloning as a way to cheat death.
"I will
be cloned after it is safe, viable, and affordable, and I don't
think that will be terribly long from now," says Wicker.
"I would sort of like live on through my later-born twin."
Experts estimate
that the procedure will cost couples between $50,000 and $60,000
initially.
Critics Question
Safety
But critics
say much more research needs to be done before human cloning is
considered safe. Even the cloning of animals like sheep, cows,
pigs and mice is still far from foolproof. For example, at Infigen,
a leading animal cloning company, the highest success rate so
far is only 15 percent. That's all right for animals, but what
about people?
Bioethicist
Alta Charo says human cloning carries an unacceptable risk of
miscarriages, stillbirths and birth defects.
"I think
it's unprofessional," says Charo. "I think it's unsafe.
It's unproven. It's certainly untested in humans…What we
are going to get, nobody knows, we've never done this before."
Zavos insists
the cloning team will not go forward if it cannot develop safe,
reliable procedures. If they can't find a way to clone safely,
they'll stop altogether.
"If by
any means we cannot develop this technology, our ambitions are
not going to drive us to the level where we are going to act irresponsibly,"
he says. "We're going to close the shop and go home, and
the world needs to know that."
Supporters
and critics of human cloning do agree on some things. It is important
to understand, they say, that a clone might look like a twin,
but it would not be the exact copy many of us envision.
"That
little baby is going to be different simply because it has a different
environment," says Wicker. "There's going to be a different
series of life experience, different nutrition. All types of things
are going to impact that child."
For example,
clones of Michael Jordan might not be great basketball players.
Instead, they might play the violin or become mathematicians.
'The Genie
Is Out of the Bottle'
There is also
agreement among the experts that, however controversial, attempts
at human cloning are inevitable. Even the chairman of the National
Bioethics Advisory Commission, which concluded in 1997 that human
cloning was unsafe and unethical, said in 1998 that it would be
"very difficult, if not impossible, to try to stop."
|
