Cloning's Kevorkian

By J. Madeleine Nash With Reporting By Wendy Cole/Chicago, Dick Thompson/ Washington And Leslie Whitaker/Oak Park

It was probably inevitable that a maverick like Richard Seed would emerge from the shadowy fringes of science to champion the cause of human cloning. Yet when Seed trotted out his scheme to open a commercial cloning clinic in the Chicago area, the world reacted with stunned surprise. President Clinton blasted the idea as "untested and unsafe and morally unacceptable." Experts questioned whether the 69-year-old physicist was capable of carrying out such an ambitious undertaking. Said University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan: "He has as much chance of cloning a human as my Uncle Morty does."

Who is Richard Seed? That's what everyone wanted to know last week, as reporters and camera crews chased the eccentric scientist from one TV studio to another. Gradually, the story of a strange and erratic life emerged, for this oversize man--who looks like an Old Testament prophet--is both brilliant and bizarre.

The son of a surgeon, Seed grew up in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, where he was, by his own description, the most unpopular student in his high school. Why? "The same reason I'm unpopular here," he says. "I was loquacious, overly intelligent, well educated. I knew too much about too many things, and that angered other people." Seed graduated cum laude from Harvard and received a Ph.D. in physics in 1953. Soon, though, his interests shifted, and he began exploring the new frontier of biomedicine. In the 1970s Seed co-founded a company that commercialized a technique for transferring embryos in cattle. Later, he and his brother, Chicago surgeon Randolph Seed, started another company to help infertile women conceive children using the same technique.

The new company, Fertility & Genetics Research Inc., seemed promising. But the procedure was cumbersome--it involved flushing embryos out of the uterus of the egg donor--and was soon eclipsed by in-vitro fertilization. Ultimately the venture failed. Indeed, Seed in recent years appears to have suffered some financial reversals. Until last summer he and his third wife Gloria lived in a two-story Victorian house in Oak Park. But the bank foreclosed on their $341,000 mortgage, and they were forced to move to a modest bungalow in nearby Riverside. "I had a beautiful house," sighs Seed. "It's very difficult to make money but extremely easy to lose it. I lost a couple of million dollars."

People who know Seed have strong reactions to him, positive and negative. The Rev. Thomas Cross, Seed's pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Oak Park, believes his interest in cloning is an extension of his Christian charity. "He's committed to human well-being," Cross says. "He's doing this out of compassion."

Former neighbor Barbara Moline sees Seed in a different light. "He started conversations by telling you he deserved to be a Nobel prizewinner," she remembers. He was always dreaming up new crusades, she says. A few years ago, Seed invited Moline to invest $75,000 in his project to cure AIDS. Last summer he asked if the church could donate space to help support his cloning research. For Seed, Moline believes, cloning represents a "last, desperate attempt to become rich and famous. He wanted to make it big, but he never did."

Seed says he has already lined up four clients for his cloning service--all couples with infertility problems--although he will not provide their names. He also claims to have put together a team of experts in reproductive technology. But he admits that he lacks financing. All the more reason, detractors observe, to seek out publicity.

That ploy could backfire. The more exposure Seed gets, the more eccentric he seems. "God made man in his own image," he told National Public Radio correspondent Joe Palca last week. "God intended for man to become one with God. Cloning...is the first serious step in becoming one with God." In a later interview on CNN, Seed elaborated: "Man," he said, "will develop the technology and the science and the capability to have an indefinite life span."

Seed has begun to remind pundits and editorial writers of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who provokes strong feelings by shattering the taboo against physician-assisted suicide. The technical challenge involved in ending a human life is trivial, however. Cloning is another matter. Ian Wilmut, the embryologist who produced Dolly, the first clone of an adult mammal, says there are "serious safety issues" involved in cloning a human. In his experiments with animals, a quarter of his lambs died within a few days of birth. Ultimately, it took 277 attempts to produce Dolly. "Should we really consider or allow experiments of this kind with people?" Wilmut asks.

Not at present, mainstream scientists universally agree. Which, of course, is why Seed has stirred up such a fuss. How do we as a society really feel about cloning humans? Will opposition really evaporate--as Seed insists it will--the minute the public beholds "half a dozen bouncing-baby, happy, smiling clones"? Seed has succeeded in forcing a national debate on the issue, but it seems increasingly unlikely that he will be the one to put it to the test.

--With Reporting By Wendy Cole/Chicago, Dick Thompson/Washington And Leslie Whitaker/Oak Park