"Human Cloning and Making Man in Our Own Image" by Alan Branch, Ph.D.

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"Human Cloning and Making Man in Our Own Image: Genetic Engineering Meets Libertarian Autonomy"

~ By Alan Branch, Ph.D. (11-01) ~

The cloning of Dolly the sheep has brought us one step closer to the "brave new world" described by Aldous Huxley. Unlike earlier procedures which used fetal cells, with Dolly we entered the world of a cloned adult mammal, technically called "Somatic cell nuclear transfer." Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell, and Colin Tudge, all involved with the cloning project at the Roslin institute, defended their work in a book they co-authored called The Second Creation: Dolly and the Age of Biological Control. Beyond a description of the scientific procedures and hard work that led to the birth of Dolly, this book offers us some insight into the worldview of those involved in the project.

Cambell and Wilmut argue that their purpose was never to just to clone an animal for the sake of cloning:. Instead, they state their motives were more altruistic and say: "We do not seek simply to clone animals - to produce facsimiles of existing creatures. We are not concerned primarily with multiplying elite livestock, and still less do we want to clone human beings. This was never on our agenda; it is just what other people thought was important. Cloning for us is and has always been an exercise in science - finding out how cells work - and a technology that enables the genetic transformation of animals."1

Thus, Wilmut and Campbell claim to be in a disinterested quest for truth and knowledge, explorers venturing into uncharted technical waters. In fact, they are emphatic in their opposition to human cloning. Wilmut himself says, "Human cloning is very far from Keith's and my own thoughts and ambitions, and we would rather that no one ever attempted it."2 Yet, in the next breath, Wilmut immediately says that certainly someone will attempt to clone a human when he says, "If it is attempted - and it surely will be by somebody sometime - it would be cruel not to wish good luck to everyone involved. But the prospect of human cloning causes us grave misgivings. It is physically too risky, it could have untoward effects on the psychology of the cloned child, and in the end we see no medical justification for it."3 Essentially, the scientists who have completed the first successful somatic cell nuclear transfer say that their technology can be used for human cloning and that human cloning is a bad thing, but since other scientists are going to attempt it, they wish them good luck even though Wilmut and Campbell personally think it is wrong.

The premise of this paper is that the perspective of Wilmut and Campbell can best be described as libertarian autonomy. I hope to demonstrate that far from being incidental to the genetic revolution, libertarian autonomy is in the warp and woof of the massive changes in genetic engineering. Furthermore, this philosophical foundation is combined with extreme technological power, personal autonomy will actually decrease rather than increase for the average person. My outline is simple: I will begin by summarizing the science involved with cloning, then I will present the worldview of those involved with cloning, and finally I will offer a critique of their worldview along with subsequent dangers.

The Science of Cloning

A clone is the "exact" genetic duplication of another organism.4 Thus, a clone would be an identical twin. There are two types of cloning: The separation of Blastomere cells and the placing of an adult nucleus into a human egg (Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer). Cloning by separation of Blastomere cells was first accomplished in mice and cattle, but in 1993 Stillman and Hall accomplished it for the first time in humans. Stillman and Hall were able to accomplish this by removing the protective layer around the developing embryo (zona pellucida), splitting the cells apart, and replacing the outer coating with an artificial shell. Instead of one embryo, there were now two gentically identical embryos.5 In fact, Stillman and Hall were able to produce 48 embryos from an original 17. In contrast, Dolly was cloned by taking the nucleus of the donor sheep and putting it into a sheep oocyte after the oocyte nucleus had been removed.

The most significant aspect of this process is that Dolly was cloned using adult cells. Wilmut and Campbell took an udder cell from an adult ewe and placed it in a special solution for several days. This special solution starved the cell of nutrients helping it to become non-specialized. A thin pipette was then used to remove the nucleus from the oocyte of another ewe. Then, the cells from the two different ewes were fused with a spark of electricity. The resulting cell contained the nucleus and genes of the donor ewe and the outer layer from the second ewe. Thus, a differentiated It should be noted that Dolly was the only lamb born from 277 attempted nuclear transfers.

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1 Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell, The Second Creation: Dolly and the Age of Biological Control (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 7.

2 Ibid., 5.

3 Ibid.

4 Various forms of "clones" occur in nature. For example, single-celled organisms, including bacteria, protozoa, and yeast, produce genetically identical offspring through asexual reproduction.

5 This description of Stillman and Hall's work comes from Raymond G. Bohlin, "The Possibilities and Ethics of Human Cloning," in Genetic Engineering: A Christian Response, Demy and Steward, eds. (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publishing, 1999), 265.