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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Researchers say it's possible, but lawmakers must pave the way.
Jan 31, 2001 | It has been close to four years since the replication of Dolly the sheep -- not a very long time considering the lumbering progress of science. Still, cloning now seems like an old, tired subject that pops up periodically in the media, a run-of-the-mill hot-button topic that has become a part of the American glossary of debatable issues, like gay rights or abortion.
Not coincidentally, each of these issues is inherently tied to the other: All involve life choices that revolve around sex, our national obsession. Of course, humanity's preoccupation with sex is just a cloak for its true obsession with reproduction or, more precisely, immortality.
Most evolutionary biologists will tell you that all organisms are obsessed with reproduction and passing on DNA; yet I doubt the road to procreation for other sentient beings that may exist in the universe, regardless of their sophistication or culture, is as littered with condoms, sex toys, birth control pills, test tubes, child support payments and abortion clinics as our own.
For humans today, the rites of reproduction, not to mention the rights to reproduction, are more complex and more contentious than ever. But for the most part, creating a child still requires a woman and a man or, to be more specific, the DNA of an egg and the DNA of a sperm.
Yet when Dolly was cloned a link emerged between cloning and reproduction, and predictably, a controversy ensued. On the edges of it were people like Richard Seed, a physicist who wanted to establish a cloning clinic to provide babies for infertile couples. And then there were the Raelians, a cultish religious group in Canada dedicated to the belief that extraterrestrial scientists seeded this planet by way of cloning. (They have recently announced plans to clone a deceased child.)
Meanwhile, Randolfe Wicker, an unofficial spokesman for human cloning who founded the Clone Rights United Front, mixes science and gay rights activism. Currently the director of the Human Cloning Foundation, Wicker argues for human cloning as a means to copy himself in the name of reproduction and feels strongly that cloning should be used by any and all persons who wish to do the same. Clearly, with Dolly, the path to immortality has forked, creating options in reproduction that go beyond or around the "man and wife" route and focus on mixing DNA.
A plausible reproductive option that involves the manipulation of DNA is a laboratory technique called egg nuclear transfer. It has been suggested that this method of manipulating the DNA of human eggs now be applied to infertility cases in which the mitochondria (essential structures found in every human cell) of a woman's eggs are damaged. Egg nuclear transfer, when used for infertility, would entail removing the DNA of the impaired egg and placing it into an enucleated egg -- an egg that has been cleaned of its own DNA and contains healthy mitochondria.
Because it involves human cloning, egg nuclear transfer, and any further research that encompasses it, are illegal under the current laws of many countries. But legislation that would allow nuclear transfer research for infertility treatment was voted into law by the British Parliament late last month, igniting a debate about how use of the technique might be expanded to include controversial applications.
