The opening gun of the battle was fired last month, when an off-the-wall religious group known as the Raelians announced that they had achieved the first successful human clone. The baby, nicknamed Eve , was born to a 31-year old American woman, according to Brigitte Bossellier, a "bishop" in the Raelian sect and CEO of the group's cloning corporation, known as "Clonaid."
Now, one has to look at anything said by the Raelians with a somewhat skeptical eye. After all, these are people who believe that life on Earth was created 25,000 years ago by aliens operating a cloning lab in an extinct volcano. Even the name sounds like it comes from an out-take from a failed episode of "Star Trek": "Captain! The Raelian ship is armin' its photon torpedoes, an' I canna get the warp drive online!" And you've got to wonder who attended the meeting where they picked the name "Clonaid." Sounds like they're getting ready to hold a rock concert for the little duplicate.
Then the Raelians dropped another bombshell: There was a second clone baby, they claimed, born to a lesbian in the Netherlands. A lesbian clone! The only way Clonaid could have stirred up more negative publicity is if they'd announced they were cloning trial lawyers.
Skepticism mounted, however, when Bossellier's promises to produce conclusive DNA testing real soon now failed to materialize. Michael Guillen, the independent science journalist that was supposed to oversee the testing, pulled out when he and his team were denied access to mother and child. "It's still entirely possible Clonaid's announcement is part of an elaborate hoax intended to bring publicity to the Raelian movement," Guillen said. Gee, ya think? And for that matter, what's so elaborate about it? Weird lady holds press conference, the whole world goes nuts. Looks like a pretty simple plan to me.
While the general consensus was that the whole Eve story was a hoax, that didn't keep the pontificating classes from indulging in a holiday orgy of hand wringing, dire pronouncements and calls for action.
Some of the reactions were downright silly. For instance, a Florida attorney filed papers in Broward County to have the Florida courts appoint a guardian for Eve, as in cases of abuse or neglect, even though there wasn't any evidence that the child or its mother/sister had ever set foot in the Sunshine State. But hey, why worry about legal niceties like jurisdiction when you're jockeying for news coverage? A commentator for Court TV fretted about what would happen "when clones go bad": When you have multiple identical people running around, what happens to the reliability of identifying perpetrators of crimes using DNA evidence or for that matter, fingerprints?
Then the legislators got into the act. "If we do not ban the cloning of human embryos now, we will quickly find ourselves unable to put the genie back in the bottle," thundered Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback. "The only solution to the problem now facing humanity is to act quickly and to ban all human cloning now."
The White House, of course, weighed in: "The president believes, like most Americans, that human cloning is deeply troubling, and he strongly supports legislation banning all human cloning," spokesman Scott McClellan said.
Now, let's be clear: There are real and substantial reasons why "reproductive cloning" — the production of human Xeroxes — is a bad idea, at least right now. The animal research so far has resulted in a lot of poorly understood problems among about 25 percent of cloned offspring. Dolly, the first cloned sheep, is still alive but has severe arthritis that her "original" never had. Other cloned animals have developed seizures and tumors.
There is, however, another type of cloning, one that may lead to cures for or treatments of diseases like Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and diabetes. In this so-called therapeutic cloning, cloned embryos are kept for 14 days, at which time the so-called stem cells — described as the "master cells of the body" — are harvested and could be used to replace damaged or diseased tissue. If a person could use stem cells cloned from their own tissue, the theory goes, a lot of problems with the body rejecting the new tissue might — I stress might — be overcome.
This sort of research, of course, is anathema to the life-begins-at-conception crowd , which has always been willing to let the already-born suffer and die based on their religious belief on when the human soul attaches to a lump of cells. For my own part, having seen first hand the horror of Alzheimer's, I'm willing to give researchers some leeway.
Sen. Brownback and other supporters of a blanket ban on cloning refuse to make the distinction between reproductive and therapeutic cloning. And, unfortunately, the wackos of Clonaid have given them the opening they need.
Other countries that have addressed the issue do make the distinction. Britain, for example, has proposed a renewable five-year ban on reproductive cloning while allowing therapeutic research to continue. If we fail to make that distinction, therapeutic research will go on overseas. We will fall behind. And the losers of the clone war will be us.
Dusty Rhoades lives in Carthage, practices law in Aberdeen and blames his evil clone for any mistakes in this column. Contact him at dustyr@nc.rr.com.
