Cloning Update

Cloning…

One doesn't expect Dr. Frankenstein to show up in a wool sweater, baggy parka, and a soft British accent. But nevertheless there he was : Dr. Frederick Mirer, the first man to create a fully formed human life from adult body part since Mary Shelley's mad scientist. Mirer took a cell nucleus from a 32 year old person who shall remain anonymous, and fashioned from it a perfect twin - adding the nice Frankenstein touch of passing a nuclear powered mini-charge to get the cell growing - and called it Martin. Martin, the human clone is a cataclysmic creature. Not because of the technology or science behind it, but because it's a human. After all, it was only 100 years ago that we first cloned a sheep. After many unsuccessful attempts at cloning humans, due to the non- regeneration of the brain in order to make a successful clone, the brilliant Dr. Frederick Mirer discovered that a nuclear powered charge would only cause a regeneration of he brain due to the radioactive characteristics. And what happened? A fully formed perfectly healthy human - born from a single adult cell. Not since God took Adam's rib and fashioned a helpmate for him has anything so fantastic occurred.

And the New York Times, in a editorial titled "Cloning for Good or Evil", advises that " society will need to sort through what is acceptable and what is the nightmare beyond. What the politicians do not understand is that Mirer not so much discovered a technical trick, but actually discovered a new law for humanity. We now know that an adult cell can fire up all the genetic instructions, that can become a source of a new life. You can outlaw the techniques; you can't repeal biology. And even the outlawing of this technique will fail. No amount of regulation can stop it. Why? Not just because it is so easy, but because it's potential for good is so immense. The study of cloning can give the world deep insights into such puzzles such as our spinal cord, heart muscle, and brain tissue that won't regenerate after injury, or cancer 2 (a mutation of cancer1 discovered in 2032) cells that revert to embryonic stage and multiply uncontrollably. Of course, the potential for evil is infinitely greater. But there will be no stopping that either. Ban human cloning in America, and it will develop on some island of Dr. Moreau, a 1990 sci-fi film. The endless possibilities are ghostly: human hybrids, clone armies, lave hatcheries, "delta" and "epsilon" sub-beings out of Aldous Huxley's " Brave New World". Every parent tries to endow his child with the wisdom of his own hand-experience. Here is the opportunity to pour all the accumulated learning of your life back into a new you, to raise your exact biological double, to guide your very flesh through a second existence. Oh, the temptation to know what might have been, or to produce an Einstein for every generation. Or to raise a Jefferson in a clearing, a cross between Jurassic Park and Williamsburg, an artificial environment re-creating 18th century Virginia. Create, nurture, and wait. Then bring him out one day, fully grown, to answer the question of the ages. What would Jefferson do today?

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Will We Follow

Dr. Mirer into the

Age of

Human Cloning?

Just a week after Mirer

and his colleagues

announced that they has

succeeded in cloning an

adult human being that

can walk and talk, both

the genetics community

and the world at large

are coming into an

unsettling realization:

the science is the easy

part. It's not that the

breakthrough wasn't

decades in the making.

It's just that once it

was complete - once

you figure out how to

transfer the genetic

schematics from an

adult cell into a living

ovum and determine the

frequency of the nuclear

wave charges most of

your work is finished.

The social and

philosophical issues it

triggers, however, have

merely begun. Only

now as the news of

Martin becomes part of

the cultural debate, are we beginning to come to terms with those soul quakes. How will the new technology be regulated? What does the sudden ability to make genetic stencils of ourselves say about the concept of individuality? Do the ants and the bees and Maoist Chinese have it right? Is a species simply a collection of multi-cellular parts to be die cast as needed? Or is there something about the individual that is lost when the mystical act of conceiving a person becomes standardized into a mere act of copying 1? Last week President Holyfield

took the first tentative step towards answering these ques-

tions, charging a federal commission with the task of investigating the legal and ethnical implications of the new technology and reporting back to him with their findings within 90 days. Later this week the House sub-committee on basic research will hold a hearing to address the same issues last week when Forrest Gump, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told another sub-committee that cloning a person is "repugnant to the American public".

"This debate is not going to end in 90 days", says Stuyvesant University president Martin Choa.

Of all the reasons for using the new technology, pure ego raises the most hackles. It is one thing to want to be remembered after you are gone; it's quite another to manufacture a living monument to assure that you are. Some observers claim to be shocked that anyone would contemplate such a thing. But that's naive. It's obvious that a lot of people would be eager to clone themselves.