Send in the Clones

Why Yair Reisner of the Weizmann Institute is important, even though he didn’t step off a flying saucer

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

01/05/03

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/clonesII.htm

It’s not often you get to see Type Five howling cat fights in the scientific, political, and religious communities at the same time, but a sect calling themselves the Raelians managed just that last week with their announcement that they had just just had sucessfully birthed the first cloned human being. Working with a company they own called Cloneaid, the sect claims to have several other cloned human births pending, including two taken from the cells of children killed in accidents.

Brigitte Boisselier, a bishop of the sect, says that the scientific proof of the cloning would be produced sometime in the next eight or nine days, which is more than a little bit strange. Normally, a scientist who manages such a spectacular breakthrough has all the documentation and data compiled, because he’s going to want to submit it to peer review and verification as fast as he can once word gets out.

Eight or nine days. The group, unless they’ve discovered a way to short cut pregnancy, has had eight or nine months to prepare for today. And of course, a few days have gone by, and now there seems to be a problem with the mother of the baby saying she doesn’t want to subject herself and her baby to DNA tests. Now, there’s a surprise.

The trouble is, this group believes that humans were created by aliens and that we must populate the cosmos by cloning.

Hmmm. This is just a wild guess, but there might be some credibility issues here.

I seriously doubt anything will come of this story as far as an actual breakthrough in cloning goes, but the sect nevertheless did everyone a favor by forcing humanity to take a hard look at the implications of cloning. We’ve been doing that off and on ever since the concept first came up in the 1960s, but we’ve reached a point where cloning of a human is going to happen, and it will happen sooner, rather than later. And, incidently, the Raelians demonstrate that a sect is not necessarily a cult.

That’s the second thing to realize. The first is that cloning of a human will happen. It doesn’t matter what laws Congress passes here, or Parliament in the UK and Canada. Either it will happen someplace else, or someone will simply break the law. But it will happen, and once it has, Pandora’s cliche will be wide open, and the mixed metaphors long gone from the stables.

It will happen, and a lot of people are going to see a lot of ways to make a lot of money, and so it will keep right on happening. Legally, if they can figure out how to bribe American politicians to enact laws in such a way as to not have it appear that they are shafting the religious right again, and on the black market otherwise.

One of the creepier claims the Raelians are making is that they have two other clones growing in host mothers that came from the cells of dead children. The articles didn’t say if the bereaved parents were involved in any way in this, or if they would be getting the clones.

Last year, a Texan laid out immense sums of money to have his dog "brought back," and several outfits have since sprung up that, for considerable sums, will eventually clone pets. I read, and wrote an essay about, a news story about such outfits that came out right after the first cat was cloned. The reporter interviewed one woman who wanted to clone her dead cat. He concluded his story by relating how the woman had kitty’s Elvis costume – that’s right, Elvis costume – laid out for the day on which he came back to momma, and I concluded my essay on this by observing that this was a cat that very desperately needed to stay dead.

If "bringing back" dead pets strikes you as pretty creepy, reflect on the emotional and moral ramifications of "bringing back" dead children. You end up with a child that looks almost exactly like the dear departed Pugsley or Wednesday, but who has a considerably different personality. Would you like to be a replacement for "yourself"? There are lots of reasons why cloning humans whole is a bad idea.

One thing that is frustrating about this story breaking when it did is that it all but buried a story about cloning that has considerably more import and a lot less of the ethical and moral dilemnas than replacing living creatures presents.

An Israeli scientist, Yair Reisner of the Weizmann Institute, sucessfully grew a functioning pair of healthy kidneys in a mouse from stem cells. The kidneys took blood and produced urine, and there were no rejection problems.

What made this story spectacular is that Reisner didn’t use stem cells, either from the mouse in question, or even some other mouse. He used stem cells cultivated from pigs and humans.

Growing a functioning organ from stem cells was pretty fantastic. That it can be done across species might be the most important medical development of the 21^st century. It means we don’t have to harvest stem cells from fetuses, placental blood, or any of that. It means we can quit worrying about Larry Niven’s nightmarish scenario of "organ banks," stocked with "spare parts" from people convicted of jaywalking.

Whole body cloning isn’t a dead-end technology. But it’s not an end unto itself.

The group that stirred up all the controversy are of some interest themselves. They have some goofy beliefs, but then, nearly all religions do. They have a headquarters named "UFO Land" in Montreal, and the founder, a French journalist and race-car driver named Claude Vorilhon, claims that aliens created humans through genetic engineering. They boast over 50,000 members, mostly in Quebec. They claim to operated from "pure science" rather than faith, although their claims strongly suggest thati their "scientific method" might be a bit wonky.

For all of that, and for all the commotion that they caused this past week, they don’t seem to be bad sorts. Monica Rhor of Knight Ridder did a piece on them, and I gathered the following from it: The Raelians don’t live communally, and members are free to interact with the larger part of society as they see fit. There’s no evidence that they insist that they, and only they, have Truth, and that anything said by anyone else, particularly anything said about them, must be hateful lies. That puts them ahead of the Republican Party right there. They are opposed to racism and sexism, and are for freedom, including sexual freedom. So maybe a little goofy, but harmless.

Barring an incredible turnaround, the sect will lose what credibility it had as a result of all this, and that means it will probably gain members. In the meantime, the public consciousness has gone haring up a blind alley on the whole issue of cloning, and nobody is paying any attention to the real news that took place at the Weizmann Institute. Instead of a sober look at the important issue of tissue regeneration and implantation, people will be associating cloning with flying saucers.

The Raelians have every right in the world to make their claims. But I wish they had picked another time, and that the media had gotten its priorities – newsworthy, versus sensational – in order.

Still, at least people are talking about it again. It might help.