Prometheus, Pandora, and the Myths of Cloning

Human Life Review, Summer 2006 by van Gend, David

One of the earliest human trials in regenerative medicine was conducted on a crag high in the Caucasus around the dawn of time. Or not strictly human, since Prometheus was a Titan. But for fraternizing with humans he was pegged out on a high rock where the eagle of Hephaestus ate his liver out each day, and it grew back each night.

With remarkable scientific insight, although without specifying the key role of hepatic stem cells, the Greeks observed that the liver is the one internal organ that has a capacity for vigorous regrowth after trauma.

Prometheus was being punished for his beneficence to humans-for teaching them arts practical and aesthetic, and worst of all for stealing the secret fire of Zeus to give humans comfort in their caves and supremacy over the animals.

To call scientists "Promethean" seems to me a compliment. Their role is to benefit humankind by their labours-and scientists who labor in the field of regenerative medicine using adult stem cells are most authentically Promethean.

The proper term for scientists who violate norms of human relationships and ethics, unleashing destructive forces upon us, is not "Promethean" but "Pandoran." She was the other chapter in Zeus's punishment of Prometheus. Pandora was asexually reproduced, "forged on the anvil of Hephaestus," essentially a laboratory creation like the modern clone. Irresistibly packaged, she wowed the impressionable brother of Prometheus, who accepted her gift of a mysterious box-which, upon being opened, released all sorts of corrupt and harmful things into the world. It is said that one thing only remained in Pandora's box after all the noxious things had emerged: hope, groundless and unreasonable hope.

With cloning, modern Pandorans raise unreasonable hope with their attractively packaged deceit. With obscure motives, they threaten forms of harm to humanity that we are only beginning to understand.

Keeping the lid on Pandora's box is still possible if we can show clearly why cloning is both redundant and wrong.

Why cloning is redundant

A patient of mine with advanced Parkinson's disease hopes to be the first man treated with stem cells from the back of his nose. He is among the dozens of patients with various genetic illnesses whose stem cells have been collected for research at the Griffith University Adult Stem Cell Centre, here in Queensland, Australia.

There are cautious, very cautious, grounds for hope for my patient, given that Griffith has successfully used these adult stem cells to treat Parkinson's in rats, and is planning primate trials. If all goes well, human trials will follow.

His case is an example of the true state of stem-cell science, as opposed to its political distortion. In the public mind embryonic stem cells and cloning are the main event, whereas in reality they are a conjurer's sideshow. Adult stem cells are now safely used in 72 human conditions (for more, see www.stemcellresearch.org); embryonic stem cells remain both unusable and dangerous. The cloning lobby dreams of creating "patient-specific stem cells" for research; adult-stem-cell researchers have already achieved that goal.

Australian cloning advocate Professor Alan Trounson has recently clarified that cloning is not about cell therapies for Parkinson's or spinal injury, but is limited to the modest research goal of creating patient-specific cells for studying disease and developing drugs. That is an important clarification, since the media still pretend that embryonic stem cells, cloned or otherwise, can be used as magic bullets for direct "cell therapy." That has always been false-since, among other things, the risk of tumors inherent in the use of embryonic cells rules out human application. Trounson's revised prospectus for cloning is more honest: "It's not about cells for therapy. This is about cells that give us an opportunity to discover what causes a disease and whether we can interfere with that."1

Fine-but even that more realistic goal for cloning has been made redundant, since that is exactly the research capacity Griffith has now achieved with adult stem cells. They possess an expanding range of patient-specific stem cells, easily obtained from patients, readily transformed into the required cell type (brain, muscle, kidney, liver) and useful for genetic study of the disease and development of drugs.2 These adult stem cells are superior for research because they are cheap, ethically uncomplicated, and free of the genetic damage caused by cloning. And only adult stem cells can be used safely for direct cell therapy without the risk of tumor formation and immune rejection.

Cloning has been left for dead, and Griffith Professor Alan Mackay-Sim has written its obituary telling the Lockhart enquiry into Australia's cloning laws that "it is probable that such stem-cell lines as these will render therapeutic cloning irrelevant and impractical."3

If that view is correct, what possible justification is there for pursuing cloning? What really motivates the cloning lobby?