Of course, Hall was not unprepared for controversy, because virtually any research in human reproduction is by definition controversial. “I’ve never seen anything like this gut, visceral fear of cloning,” says Art Caplan, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Minnesota. “People are afraid of it because they don’t know anything about it.” Opposition comes partly from religious conservatives who believe that the creation of human life is too important to entrust to anyone but a husband and wife having sexual relations in the time-honored way. The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano responded to the news last week by urging the U.S. government to regulate scientists who “venture into a tunnel of madness.”
But opposition comes also from some on the left, who over the last few years have transferred the onus of presumptively destroying the human race from nuclear physicists to molecular geneticists. Research into human DNA (page 64) is viewed not as a potential boon to humanity but a sinister attempt by the government, universities and big business to control individuality at its very source. Cloning–holding out the promise, or threat, of producing unlimited numbers of genetically identical, perfect individuals–provokes an especially fierce reaction. Who would control the rights to perfect babies? Was it only a coincidence that this research came to fight just as the Home Shopping Network emerged as the most powerful force in America’s economy for the next century? “We are at the point of being able to mass-produce human beings,” warned biotech gadfly Jeremy Rifkin, who said he plans to lead weekly anti-cloning demonstrations at laboratories and clinics all over the country. “That is no less important than the first time they split the atom.”
Against that apocalyptic background, the work by Hall and his colleagues appears somewhat less than atom shattering. “I’m surprised that people have not been able to separate the ‘what if’ from what we actually did,” says Dr. Robert J. Stillman, director of GWU’s in vitro fertilization program. What most people understand by “cloning” is what Rorvik’s book purported to describe: copying the DNA from an existing organism (or, as in “Jurassic Park,” a dead one) and producing new individuals with the identical genetic makeup. Numerous comic books have also described how a mad scientist could seek world domination by cloning a lock of Hitler’s hair. Fortunately, no one knows how to do that yet, at least not with mammals. Very early in its development a mammal’s cells specialize and thereafter can make only copies of themselves. A lock of Hitler’s hair, even if scientists could extract its DNA, would only give rise to the world’s most disgusting hairball. But Hall’s work had nothing to do with this kind of cloning anyway.
The kind of cloning known to work in mammals starts with embryos at a very early stage of development, before the cells have begun to specialize. The embryo is separated into as many as eight individual cells. The cells’ DNA is extracted and transferred to individual eggs; each egg grows into an embryo which can be implanted into the uterus of a surrogate mother, giving rise to eight identical offspring. That technique is actually in use now in cattle; a prized milch cow can have eight times as many offspring as she would by normal gestation. And that is what the Times erroneously reported Hall had done with human embryos. (The newspaper did not respond to numerous requests for comment last week.) But that’s not what Hall’s work was, either.
What Hall actually did, to stretch a point, was to show the possibility of making test-tube twins. He took a fertilized human egg, let it divide into a two-cell embryo, separated the cells and showed that they would continue to grow into two separate, identical embryos. Conceptually, this was no great breakthrough, since something akin to this presumably happens inside the body when a woman conceives identical twins (page 62). Technically, Hall’s achievement lay in providing an artificial substitute for the zona pellucida, the membrane that surrounds the embryo. To split the two cells (which was done chemically, not with a knife), he had to dissolve the zona pellucida. His work showed that sodium alginate, a seaweed derivative, would serve as a substitute. It did not show whether these embryos could be successfully implanted into a woman and grow into babies–and that was for a very good reason. Since it would be unethical to experiment on viable embryos, Hall used abnormal ones–eggs accidentally fertilized by more than one sperm, which therefore had three sets of chromosomes rather than the normal two. Such embryos invariably die early in development anyway; all of Hall’s died within six days or less.
In any case, Hall’s purpose was not to rule the world, bring back the dinosaurs or even, for that matter, create twins. His concern was to improve the chances of success with in vitro fertilization, the by–now common technique for fertilizing eggs outside the body, growing them on petri dishes and implanting the resulting embryos in the wombs of women who have had trouble conceiving. Overall, GWU has gotten its success rate up to 40 percent, but the figure is dependent on the number of eggs that can be extracted from the woman and fertilized; when only one egg is available, the chances of a successful pregnancy drop to about one in 10. The GWU technique, by providing multiple embryos from a single egg, could if it works-substantially improve the odds for some infertile couples.
There are two views of this development. Stillman’s, naturally, is the lab is helping couples fulfill “one of the most basic, fundamental Darwinian laws…preservation of the species.” Riflin’s is that it is “opening the door to Brave New Worlds…of human eugenics,” in which the random work of natural selection is superseded by a planned program of technologically assisted human breeding. It’s a little hard to imagine plausible scenarios in which Hall’s work could be put to unintended uses, but perhaps not impossible. Most of these involve creating duplicate embryos, implanting one and freezing the other for some future purpose. What if…a couple raised the first child and then decided later that they liked the way he turned out, so they thawed the other and had him, too–creating, in effect, identical twins of different ages? Or the first one develops a fatal illness which can be cured by a transplant from an identical twin–who would have to be sacrificed in the procedure? Or a wife implants the embryo her mother-in-law froze all those years ago, so her husband could have himself for a son? Or the boy grows seven feet tall and signs an NBA contract for $140 million–how much would his twin be worth to some childless couple looking for security for their old age?
Well, we may never know, because at the moment GWU has no plans to take the research any further, and certainly not while Rifkin’s troops are parading outside its gates. “We took one small step,” Stillman says. “If the ‘what if’ is important, let’s debate it in a sane, rational forum.” Unfortunately, the forum in which it is likely to be debated is Congress, which Caplan, the bioethicist, thinks is not going to be much reassurance to people. “If our politicians can’t make up a coherent policy for Haiti…how are we supposed to design our descendants?” Still, all agree that guidelines are needed, because without them, nothing is likely to get done. As a first step, the rules could stipulate that no one should be allowed to clone Hitler, carnivorous dinosaurs or himself And then, if everyone is satisfied with the rules, scientists could get on with work that may save some lives or bring wanted life into the world. Rifkin is right in implying that if Madame Curie had been stopped from fooling around with radium, there might never have been atom bombs. On the other hand, there wouldn’t be X-rays, either.
