THE CLONE WARS
Biology's Chernobyl
If Rael is for real, it will set back scientific progress.
Louise Brown will celebrate her 25th birthday in July. When she was born, the first test-tube baby, she was at the center of an ethical debate almost as fierce as the one now threatening to break over Eve, the alleged first clone, born last week. In vitro fertilization is now routine and uncontroversial. Will the same happen to cloning? Will we look back in 25 years and wonder what the fuss was all about?
I doubt it. There are good reasons to be much more pessimistic about Eve. The technology that produced her is inherently unsafe, at least for now, and Eve will be lucky if she escapes serious deformity. About 30% of domestic animals born as clones have gross abnormalities of one organ or other, a rate 15 times as high as in normal births.
By the way, I am here assuming that Eve is a clone. I do so for the sake of argument, not because I especially trust the word of the cult leader Rael and his "bishop" Brigitte Boisselier, who announced the news. Any man who claims to have met a flying saucer from which descended cliché almond-eyed aliens--who abducted him for sensual experiences with voluptuous robots--is worthy of some skepticism.
But the fact is that almost every person who has set out with sufficient expertise to clone a mammal since 1997 has succeeded quite quickly. Cloning the mammal for whom implanting embryos has long been routine medical procedure should be especially easy. If the Raelians are lying, somebody else will soon succeed.
So my prediction is that Eve is a genuine clone, and tragically that she may soon be ill. The remarks made by Ms. Boisselier before and after Eve's birth suggest Ms. Boisselier does not take the risk of developmental deformity seriously. There is no evidence that her team has solved the problems of high birth weight, hypertrophied organs and premature aging that continue to bedevil the best animal-cloning laboratories.
All of which brings us to the place of moral clarity from which cloning deserves to be judged: Volunteering an unborn child for a potentially dangerous, painful and grotesquely disfigured life is morally unacceptable, even evil. The Raelians deserve all the condemnation that will rain on their heads, not because cloning is wrong in principle, but because it is unsafe.
It is already plain that cloning, if it were safe, would meet an unmet need, just as in vitro fertilization met a need that adoption did not supply. Cloning is wanted by infertile couples who cannot produce eggs and do not wish to use donated ones, by lesbians (and to a lesser extent by gay men who could find surrogate mothers) and most especially by the parents of children killed in accidents. The Web sites of cloning enthusiasts abound with demands for the opportunity to re-create a dead child.
Irrational and mistaken as these wishes often are--many of these people probably expect a clone to be the dead person, complete with memories and experiences--they seem to be inseparable from extreme grief for some people in the modern world. In the same way that nobody predicted that sex selection would be used mainly for family balancing (a girl after a string of boys, or vice versa), so nobody foresaw that demand for reproductive cloning would appear most strongly among the bereaved.
Such grief is showing itself willfully blind to the risks: Some people would do almost anything to bring back a dead child, even risk producing an unhealthy one. The combination of an unsafe technology and strong demand is explosive enough. Add in the ingredient of a cult, complete with idiotic suggestions from its leaders that one day it will be possible to clone adults directly into adulthood and transfer their memories, and last week's news threatens to become biology's Chernobyl--discrediting a whole raft of useful technologies.
Chernobyl proved that a badly designed and badly managed reactor could cause an accident capable of killing a small number of people and slightly increasing the cancer risk in a large area nearby. The worst nuclear power could do was thereby proved to be modest damage compared with the safety and environmental record of coal, oil and wind. Yet Chernobyl instead left the impression that all nuclear power was unsafe.
Likewise, the Raelians may have just made it more difficult for science to convince a skeptical public that reproductive technologies and genetic engineering can deliver benefits. No matter that they have already begun to deliver magnificent benefits: fertility for the infertile, safe insulin for diabetics, new drugs for cancer victims, individually targeted drugs for mental patients, vitamin-A-rich rice for poor children in poor countries--even the promise of stem cells to repair the damage wrought by Parkinson's disease.
Against these benefits, the disaster of one sick child produced by the premature use of reproductive cloning might seem to be a small setback. But public debate does not work that way. It takes benefits for granted and makes a massive fuss of costs. The principal victim of the backlash to Eve will be stem-cell research.
I come from Britain, a country that has banned reproductive cloning and allows embryonic stem-cell research. America does not make that distinction. Stem-cell research, or therapeutic cloning, does not create a human life, does not create a sentient creature at all. But it promises miraculous help to those who suffer from terrible afflictions. It will now be all the harder to persuade politicians of the benefits of this harmless and promising technology, because it shares a few early steps with the dangerous but legal technology of reproductive cloning.
The plot of every Hollywood film that features a scientist invariably casts him in the role of a cross between Prometheus and Faust, doomed to be punished for his hubris. The latest news will only further that stereotype.
If scientists think they can merely condemn the Raelians and escape all blame themselves, they have been in the ivory tower too long. As Europeans learned over genetically modified food, there are slick media campaigns waiting and ready to tap into a deep public suspicion that scientists are letting genies out of bottles.
There is an audience ready and willing to believe that the science that they do not understand is inherently dangerous and that those who wield the knowledge are full of malevolent intentions. Nothing could be further from the truth, but in their haste to be the first to show the world a clone, and their hunger to gather funds for the cult, the Raelians have just given that belief unjustified credence.
Mr. Ridley is the author of "Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters" (HarperCollins, 2000).
