Cloning: the missing debate - includes related information on cloning of endangered species

In July 1996, deep into an Edinburgh summer, a lamb soon to be named after Dolly Parton quietly slipped into the world. She looked and acted like a normal lamb. But seven months later she would grab international headlines for nearly a month. Her face would grace the covers of major newsmagazines and flitter across TV screens around the world. On the brink of a new millennium, Dolly had arrived. To some, she was the peaceful harbinger of the coming revolution in science and medicine. To others, she was Frankenstein.

Dolly is a clone--manufactured, so to speak, when a team led by Scottish embryologist Ian Wilmut extracted an egg from one ewe and replaced the genes of that egg with DNA from another adult ewe's mammary gland. Contrary to all prior scientific belief, an embryo developed. Wilmut then inserted the embryo into a third ewe, who gave birth 150 days later to Dolly--an exact replica of the adult whose mammary gland was tapped. Never before had anyone managed to clone a mammal from adult cells.

When Wilmut and his fellow researchers at the Roslin Institute and PPL Therapeutics, just outside Edinburgh, made Dolly's creation public in February, some scientists and armies of ethicists, religious leaders, and politicians speculated that human clones were on the horizon and that society had better decide what to do about it. Two days into the public frenzy, President Clinton placed a ban on federal funds for human cloning and launched a commission to study the ethics of human-cloning technology.

Was the public leaping to wild assumptions? Or are we really on the verge of technology that will create a world where wealthy desperadoes could clone themselves for a second chance at life or, worse yet, clone others to become soldiers or workers? And what about the infertile couple that wants a child with guaranteed genes? Or parents who beg to clone a dying child? The scenarios were endless and starting to seem a bit unreal to some.

Just then, along came news that the Oregon Regional Primate Center had produced sibling rhesus monkeys from cloned embryos. The process used to create these primate clones was more primitive than Wilmut's blockbuster technology, but the fact that science could replicate a species so close to humans hit home. Hearings were held to consider bans on human cloning. Editorials were written. News crews invaded university and corporate labs for quotes from future cloners.

Now, in the wake of these debates, a meter reading on current public sentiment would likely show this: genetic tinkering for agriculture or medicine is good, but human cloning crosses a line. That same meter reading might imply that society's concerns for animals are so far on the other side of this line that, in a monthlong media frenzy, concerns about the animals involved in or created by cloning experiments were hardly mentioned.

The missing commentary on animals doesn't surprise veterinarian Michael Fox, vice president of bioethics and farm-animal protection at the Humane Society of the United States. "It's just another variation on the theme of man's unquestioned dominion over animals," charges Fox, who says the advent of animal cloning places humans on "a new threshold of genetic parasitism."

Nor is the point lost on Jeremy Rifkin, founder of the Washington, D.C.-based Foundation on Economic Trends. Rifkin and his group have worked for some 20 years to keep genetically engineered plants and animals out of the national and international marketplaces. The experiment that led to Dolly was one of several conducted in Scotland and around the world to make the production of genetically altered, or transgenic, animals cheaper and faster. Wilmut's new technology greatly improves corporate prospects for mass-producing animals that yield leaner meat or more meat, generate high quantities of human proteins that can he harvested for the pharmaceutical trade, or even provide spare parts for humans needing organ transplants. "I think it's outrageous and scandalous to turn animals into chemical factories," says Rifkin of pharmaceutical transgenics. "Companies will say that they're doing this for the greater good. But there are other ways to do it."

Dolly may be today's news, but genetic tinkering has been around for decades. So when it comes to cloning, most animal advocates say their concerns mirror their reservations about creating any genetically altered animal--clone or not. Already transgenic-animal research has resulted in some animal-protection woes. Peter Theran, director of the Center for Laboratory Animal Welfare (CLAW) at the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals/American Humane Education Society, points out that 277 eggs were fused before one of them produced Dolly and that methods to render transgenic animals "are similarly inefficient." Experiments have given birth to animals that have fatal bleeding disorders, can't nurse or reproduce, are susceptible to tumors, are crippled with arthritis, or suffer from diabetes or kidney disease. "In other words," he says, "animals are created with serious threats to their own health and welfare." And while many believe the benefits of such research outweigh the cost of animal suffering, a recent CNN poll said a full 66 percent of the U.S. population opposes cloning animals.