ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 24, 1997 TAG: 9702240119
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PETER KENDALL CHICAGO TRIBUNE
A PANEL ON ETHICS said in 1964 that ``to create a child with one's exact genetic constitution is narcissistic and ethically impoverished.''
Distraught because he believes he will never produce offspring, a sterile man listens to a doctor explaining how he can, indeed, father a biological son.
The boy would be the image of his old man, the doctor says. In fact, the son would be a genetic carbon copy of his father - a clone.
With all its ethical difficulties, that scenario is just one of many that leaped from fantasy to possibility with the cloning of a Scottish lamb.
In the past, reports of cloning experiments could be tempered by assurances that they had no applications to human beings. Not so with the experiment reported in this week's issue of the science journal Nature.
Cloning a mammal from mature body tissue is a quantum leap toward what many have pondered and some have feared - cloning people.
``This is as close to a Xerox machine as we are going to get in reproductive technology,'' said Glenn McGee, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania.
For years, ethicists have mulled over the moral values of cloning. Why would someone want to do it? Who would be hurt? Should it be legal?
Now their academic ruminations have new importance.
The first products to emerge from the remarkable cloning of an adult sheep by British researchers will probably be animals that can serve as drug factories.
PPL Therapeutics PLC, a small biotechnology company based in Edinburgh, Scotland, has the rights to the technology developed at the Roslin Institute for the production of genetically altered mammals that could produce therapeutic proteins in their milk. Patents have been applied for.
PPL has about 120 employees in Edinburgh, with 20 at its American subsidiary, PPL Therapeutics, in Blacksburg, Va., and five in New Zealand.
The Roslin Institute retains all agricultural rights.
Although the Roslin Institute's lamb is ordinary in every respect but its conception, scientists could easily clone animals genetically engineered to produce pharmacologically useful proteins in their milk, Dr. Ron James, managing director of PPL, said Sunday. This would be more efficient than the current process of cultivating genetically altered yeast, bacteria or mammalian cells.
In 1994, the National Advisory Board on Ethics in Reproduction issued a report on the ethics of cloning.
``NABER members find the scenario of giving birth to one's identical twin (or giving birth to one's husband's identical twin) bizarre,'' the report said. ``They maintain that to create a child with one's exact genetic constitution is narcissistic and ethically impoverished.''
But is every case so cut and dried?
The advisory board's paper raised this scenario: What if a couple want to have a child, but one partner will pass on a debilitating genetic condition and neither considers it acceptable to use donor eggs or sperm?
The paper concluded that such situations would be so rare that they do ``not justify a blanket acceptance of this practice.''
Many of the ethical issues raised by cloning are already being confronted by people concerned about the existing potential for genetic engineering in human reproduction. Soon, some predict, parents will be able to choose many of their baby's traits - short to tall, cautious to risk-taking.
``We are going from a period of time where people had babies to where people make babies,'' said McGee, author of the new book, ``The Perfect Baby.''
The issues have resisted sorting into piles of right and wrong.
``People have already had children because they had one child who needed a bone marrow transplant and needed a donor,'' he said. ``This would just be a case where, when you were going to do that, you would be sure to have a match.
``I don't think it is necessarily immoral.''
But humanity might not be ready for asexual reproduction, with its enormous cultural implications.
``That we might be the same from parent to child to grandchild is such a radical departure from the normal state of things that it would require a whole rethinking of the way we raise the next generation,'' said Gladys White, executive director of NABER.
Just proving that human cloning is possible is almost unthinkable because the very first experiments would be repugnant.
``To even justify doing the experiment, you would have to say, `What will we do if we produce a malformed baby?''' said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. ``What is the ethical purpose of even trying?''
Many of the more frightening scenarios that the Scottish experiment might inspire still belong to science fiction, however.
The sheep cells used in the cloning were robust, living cells, not dead ones.
There is no indication that, say, Abraham Lincoln's dried blood and skull fragments (on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C.) could be used to create a new Lincoln.
Besides, people are much more than their genes.
``If I try to create Abraham Lincoln without having him born in 1809 and having him be the president during the Civil War, he would not turn out to be Abraham Lincoln,'' Caplan said.
The experiments also do not imply that extinct species, like the long-gone Tyrannosaurus rex, could be re-created, as in ``Jurassic Park.''
But what about species on the verge of extinction?
The last passenger pigeon died in a cage in Cincinnati's zoo in 1914.
If in 2014, another bird is perched alone on the edge of extinction, would it be a good idea to clone it, again and again, maintaining a permanent, captive flock of identical, non-reproducing birds?
The Scottish researchers were ostensibly trying to do something much less grandiose. They were concerned with the same thing Scottish breeders have been working on for centuries - making livestock more efficient.
``What counts in terms of similarity in identity in a sheep is not what we value in terms of similarity of identity in people,'' Caplan said. ``Having identical brain structures doesn't make you the same person. Having identical lamb chops, or duplicate leg of mutton, is interesting, though, if your goal is to eat it.''
The New York Times contributed to this story.
LENGTH: Long : 118 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Dolly, the world's first clone of an adult mammal,by CNBacts sheepish at age 7 months. She was developed at the Roslin
Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland. color.