www.checkbiotech.org ; www.raupp.info ; www.czu.cz

February 22 marked the tenth anniversary of the biggest event in the history
of biomedicine, the cloning of Dolly. Back in 1997, Ian Wilmut and his
colleagues at Roslin Institute near Edinburgh announced that they had
produced a lamb genetically identical to an adult ewe. This development
ignited one of the biggest debates on the ethics of scientific research in
decades. It also opened up the exciting new fields of stem cell research and
therapeutic cloning, February 2007 by Michael Cook.

Curiously, the intensity of public interest caught scientists off guard,
even the journal Nature which published Wilmut's research. While the media
instantly focused on the possibility of armies of Adolf Hitlers, scientists
saw Dolly merely as an incremental step forward on a paper published the
year before.

Now that Dolly is just a stuffed sheep in a museum case, it's time to take
stock. What ethical lessons have scientists in this field learned?

First, there is still no money in cloned animals. Sheep, mice, goats, pigs,
cattle, rabbits, cats and even horses have been cloned. The US Food and Drug
Administration recently declared cloned animals safe to eat, but the process
is still inefficient and the meat would be astronomically expensive. Most
cloned animals are stillborn, sick or deformed. Cloned humans would be, too.
At the moment, human reproductive cloning is the stuff of science fiction.

But therapeutic cloning, which involves creating cloned human embryos, ? la
Dolly, promises to be very profitable. It could lead to cures, advances in
drug testing and discoveries in genetic research.

Second, scientists have displayed an surprising capacity for stretching the
truth. Over and over again some of them have succumbed to media adulation,
intense competition for worldwide kudos and the prospect of bulging wallets.
Wilmut himself was accused of hogging the credit for Dolly in a nasty court
case. A number of researchers have been criticised for doing science by
press release. The worst was the revelation that the first cloned human
embryos and stem cell lines had been faked. Hwang Woo-suk, once the pin-up
boy for Korean science, was an out-and-out fraud.

Third, there are smart, unscrupulous and loopy scientists out there. After
Dolly, media hounds, religious nuts and medical entrepreneurs announced that
they were ready to clone babies, never with peer review, normally in an
undisclosed location always for boodles of cash. Richard Seed, Severino
Antinori, Panos Zavos and Brigitte Boisseier and the Raelian cult have all
had their 15 minutes of fame. And they have all been charlatans.

Fourth, most scientists working in the field will back human reproductive
cloning if it ever become safe. Many prominent bioethicists have already
endorsed it as an alternative to IVF. A manifesto released by the world's
scientific academies has failed to rule it out. Nature acknowledged this in
an editorial last week:

But as the science of epigenetics and of development inevitably progresses,
those for whom cloning is the only means to bypass sterility or genetic
disease, say, will increasingly demand its use. Unless there is some unknown
fundamental biological obstacle, and given wholly positive ethical
motivations, human reproductive cloning is an eventual certainty.

Fifth, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die opposition to unsafe reproductive
cloning makes scientists sound ethical. But often this is the one and only
ethically controversial procedure which they oppose. Where the "yuk factor"
is less powerful -- eg, genetic engineering, the use of human-animal hybrid
embryos, markets in human eggs and sperm, the creation of embryos for
research -- critics are dismissed as Luddites or religious fundamentalists.
These controversial developments are steadily gaining credibility in the
media and in the courts, thanks to the influence of leading stem cell
researchers.

Sixth, cloning scientists are still as obtuse as ever about the ethical
implications of their work. Wilmut, for instance, published a book last
year, After Dolly: The Uses and Misuses of Human Cloning, and suggested to a
journalist that it might be immoral not to genetically engineer children. He
seems a bit miffed when people gag on the idea.

There is a desperate need for deeper ethical reflection upon the
consequences of tinkering with human reproduction, lest we surrender our
souls to technology. However, the scientific community, for the most part,
has embraced a smorgasbord of utilitarianism (if enough people want it, why
not?) and libertarianism (who are you to tell me what to do?). Leading
scientific journals like Science, Nature and the New England Journal of
Medicine shriek "Inquistion! Galileo! Taliban!" if the benefits of
therapeutic cloning are questioned.

So where are scientists now, ethically, after a decade of debate? Not one
step further than when we started. Instead of examining the social and moral
implications of cloning technology, the scientific community has basically
embraced the ethics of inevitability -- it's impossible to put the genie
back in the bottle, impossible to stop progress, impossible to thwart public
demand for cures for dread diseases. It's all A-OK and let's get on with
business.

There's no telling where this shallow pragmatism will take them -- and us.

[www.mercatornet.com]