WILL WE FOLLOW THE SHEEP?

By Jeffrey Kluger

It's a busy morning in the cloning laboratory of the big-city hospital. As always, the list of people seeking the lab's services is a long one--and, as always, it's a varied one. Over here are the Midwestern parents who have flown in specially to see if the lab can make them an exact copy of their six-year-old daughter, recently found to be suffering from leukemia so aggressive that only a bone-marrow transplant can save her. The problem is finding a compatible donor. If, by reproductive happenstance, the girl had been born an identical twin, her matching sister could have produced all the marrow she needed. But nature didn't provide her with a twin, and now the cloning lab will try. In nine months, the parents, who face the very likely prospect of losing the one daughter they have, could find themselves raising two of her--the second created expressly to help keep the first alive.

Just a week after Scottish embryologists announced that they had succeeded in cloning a sheep from a single adult cell, both the genetics community and the world at large are coming to 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 figured out how to transfer the genetic schematics from an adult cell into a living ovum and keep the fragile embryo alive throughout gestation--most of your basic biological work was finished. The social and philosophical temblors it triggers, however, have merely begun.

Only now, as the news of Dolly, the sublimely oblivious sheep, becomes part of the cultural debate, are we beginning to come to terms with those soulquakes. 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 bees and Maoist Chinese have it right? Is a species simply an uberorganism, a collection of multicellular 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 photocopying one?

Last week President Clinton took the first tentative step toward answering these questions, charging a federal commission with the task of investigating the legal and ethical implications of the new technology and reporting back to him with their findings within 90 days. Later this week the House subcommittee on basic research will hold a hearing to address the same issues. The probable tone of those sessions was established last week when Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), told another subcommittee that cloning a person is "repugnant to the American public."

Though the official responses were predictable--and even laudable--they may have missed the larger point. The public may welcome ways a government can regulate cloning, but what's needed even more is ways a thinking species can ethically fathom it. "This is not going to end in 90 days," says Princeton University president Harold Shapiro, chairman of President Clinton's committee. "Now that we have this technology, we have some hard thinking ahead of us."

Also waiting in the cloning lab this morning is the local industrialist. Unlike the Midwestern parents, he does not have a sick child to worry about; indeed, he has never especially cared for children. Lately, however, he has begun to feel different. With a little help from the cloning lab, he now has the opportunity to have a son who would bear not just his name and his nose and the color of his hair but every scrap of genetic coding that makes him what he is. Now that appeals to the local industrialist. In fact, if this first boy works out, he might even make a few more.

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

"It's a horrendous crime to make a Xerox of someone," argues author and science critic Jeremy Rifkin. "You're putting a human into a genetic straitjacket. For the first time, we've taken the principles of industrial design--quality control, predictability--and applied them to a human being."

But is it really the first time? Is cloning all that different from genetically engineering an embryo to eliminate a genetic disease like cystic fibrosis? Is it so far removed from in vitro fertilization? In both those cases, after all, an undeniable reductiveness is going on, a shriveling of the complexity of the human body to the certainty of a single cell in a Petri dish. If we accept this kind of tinkering, can't we accept cloning? Harvard neurobiologist Lisa Geller admits that intellectually, she doesn't see a difference between in vitro technology and cloning. "But," she adds, "I admit it makes my stomach feel nervous."

More palatable than the ego clone to some bioethicists is the medical clone, a baby created to provide transplant material for the original. Nobody advocates harvesting a one-of-a-kind organ like a heart from the new child--an act that would amount to creating the clone just to kill it. But it's hard to argue against the idea of a family's loving a child so much that it will happily raise another, identical child so that one of its kidneys or a bit of its marrow might allow the first to live. "The reasons for opposing this are not easy to argue," says John Fletcher, former ethicist for the NIH.

The problem is that once you start shading the cloning question--giving an ethical O.K. to one hypothetical and a thumbs-down to another--you begin making the sort of ad hoc hash of things the Supreme Court does when it tries to define pornography. Suppose you could show that the baby who was created to provide marrow for her sister would forever be treated like a second-class sibling--well cared for, perhaps, but not well loved. Do you prohibit the family from cloning the first daughter, accepting the fact that you may be condemning her to die? Richard McCormick, a Jesuit priest and professor of Christian ethics at the University of Notre Dame, answers such questions simply and honestly when he says, "I can't think of a morally acceptable reason to clone a human being."

In a culture in which not everyone sees things so straightforwardly, however, some ethical accommodation is going to have to be reached. How it will be done is anything but clear. "Science is close to crossing some horrendous boundaries," says Leon Kass, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago. "Here is an opportunity for human beings to decide if we're simply going to stand in the path of the technological steamroller or take control and help guide its direction."

Following the local industrialist on the appointments list is the physics laureate. He is terminally ill. When he dies, one of the most remarkable minds in science will die with him. Reproductive chance might one day produce another scientist just as gifted, but there is no telling when. The physics laureate does not like that kind of uncertainty. He has come to the cloning lab today to see if he can't do something about it.

If the human gene pool can be seen as a sort of species-wide natural resource, it's only sensible for the rarest of those genes to be husbanded most carefully, preserved so that every generation may enjoy their benefits. Even the most ardent egalitarians would find it hard to object to an Einstein appearing every 50 years or a Chopin every century. It would be better still if we could be guaranteed not just an Einstein but the Einstein. If a scientific method were developed so that the man who explained general relativity in the first half of the century could be brought back to crack the secrets of naked singularities in the second, could we resist using it? And suppose the person being replicated were researching not just abstruse questions of physics but pressing questions of medicine. Given the chance to bring back Jonas Salk, would it be moral not to try?

Surprisingly, scientific ethicists seem to say yes. "Choosing personal characteristics as if they were options on a car is an invitation to misadventure," says John Paris, professor of bioethics at Boston College. "It is in the diversity of our population that we find interest and enthusiasm."

Complicating things further, the traits a culture values most are not fixed. If cloning had existed a few centuries ago, men with strong backs and women with broad pelvises would have been the first ones society would have wanted to reproduce. During the industrial age, however, brainpower began to count for more than muscle power. Presumably the custodians of cloning technology at that historical juncture would have faced the prospect of letting previous generations of strapping men and fecund women die out and replacing them with a new population of intellectual giants. "What is a better human being?" asks Boston University ethicist George Annas. "A lot of it is just fad."

Even if we could agree on which individuals would serve as humanity's templates of perfection, there's no guarantee that successive copies would be everything the originals were. Innate genius isn't always so innate, after all, coming to nothing if the person born with the potential for excellence doesn't find the right environment and blossom in it. A scientific genius who's beaten as a child might become a mad genius. An artist who's introduced to alcohol when he's young might merely become a drunk. A thousand track switches have to click in sequence for the child who starts out toward greatness to wind up there. If a single one clicks wrong, the high-speed rush toward a Nobel Prize can dead-end in a makeshift shack in the Montana woods. Says Rabbi Moshe Tendler, professor of both biology and biblical law at Yeshiva University in New York City: "I can make myself an Albert Einstein, and he may turn out to be a drug addict."

The despot will not be coming to the cloning lab today. Before long, he knows, the lab's science will come to him--and not a moment too soon. The despot has ruled his little country for 30 years, but now he's getting old and will have to pass his power on. That makes him nervous; he's seen what can happen to a cult of personality if too weak a personality takes over. Happily, in his country that's not a danger. As soon as the technology of the cloning lab goes global--as it inevitably must--his people can be assured of his leadership long after he's gone.

This is the ultimate nightmare scenario. The Pharaohs built their pyramids, the Emperors built Rome, and Napoleon built his Arc de Triomphe--all, at least in part, to make the permanence of stone compensate for the impermanence of the flesh. But big buildings and big tombs would be a poor second choice if the flesh could be made to go on forever. Now, it appears, it can.

The idea of a dictator's being genetically duplicated is not new--not in pop culture, anyhow. In Ira Levin's 1976 book The Boys from Brazil a zealous ex-Nazi bred a generation of literal Hitler Youth--boys cloned from cells left behind by the Fuhrer. Woody Allen dealt with a similar premise a lot more playfully in his 1973 film Sleeper, in which a futuristic tyrant is killed by a bomb blast, leaving nothing behind but his nose--a nose that his followers hope to clone into a new leader. Even as the fiction of one decade becomes the technology of another, it's inevitable that this technology will be used--often by the wrong people.

"I don't see how you can stop these things," says bioethicist Daniel Callahan of the Hastings Center in Briarcliff Manor, New York. "We are at the mercy of these technological developments. Once they're here, it's hard to turn back."

Hard, perhaps, but not impossible. If anything will prevent human cloning--whether of dictator, industrialist or baby daughter--from becoming a reality, it's that science may not be able to clear the ethical high bar that would allow basic research to get under way in the first place. Cutting, coring and electrically jolting a sheep embryo is a huge moral distance from doing the same to a human embryo. It took 277 trials and errors to produce Dolly the sheep, creating a cellular body count that would look like sheer carnage if the cells were human. "Human beings ought never to be used as experimental subjects," Shapiro says simply.

Whether they will or not is impossible to say. Even if governments ban human cloning outright, it will not be so easy to police what goes on in private laboratories that don't receive public money--or in pirate ones offshore. Years ago, Scottish scientists studying in vitro fertilization were subjected to such intense criticism that they took their work underground, continuing it in seclusion until they had the technology perfected. Presumably, human-cloning researchers could also do their work on the sly, emerging only when they succeed.

Scientists don't pretend to know when that will happen, but some science observers fear it will be soon. The first infant clone could come squalling into the world within seven years according to Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. If he's right, science had better get its ethical house in order quickly. In calendar terms, seven years from now is a good way off; in scientific terms, it's tomorrow afternoon.

--Reported by Dick Thompson/Washington, with other bureaus

For more about the ethics of cloning, visit time.com/cloning on the World Wide Web

With reporting by Dick Thompson/Washington, with other bureaus