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Volume 1 (1999/2000)
Issue
1 (March 1999)
Issue
2 (Nov. 1999)
Issue 3 (Dec. 1999)
Issue 4 (Feb. 2000)
Issue 5 (March 2000)
Issue 6 (April 2000)
Issue
7 (May 2000)
Volume 2 (2000/2001)
Issue 1 (Sept. 2000)
Issue 2 (Oct. 2000)
Issue 3 (Jan. 2001)
Issue 4 (March 2001)
Issue 5 (April 2001)
Issue 6 (May 2001)
Volume 3 (2001)
Issue 1 (Sept. 2001)
Issue 2 (Nov. 2001)
Categories
Sport: 1
2 3
Lifestyles: 1 2
3
Commentary: 1 2
3
Review: 1 2
3
Writing: 1 2
3
Event: 1 2
3
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Catherine Howard
Regina Mundi, Cork
Nineteen-ninety-three's blockbuster movie Jurassic Park opened the worlds'
eyes to the far-reaching possibilities of cloning. In the quiet moments
interspersed throughout the scenes of running, screaming and dismembered
body parts, we oohed and aahed at the depiction of a world where natural
selection is superseded and scientists play God. Although obtaining, and
hence, cloning dinosaur DNA is still science fiction, there were moments
in that film when reality seeped through with a moral voice. At the beginning,
a character named Ian Malcolm turns to the man responsible for the feat
and says, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not
they could, they never stopped to think if they should."
Dolly Parton is renowned for many things, but certainly not contributing
to modern genetics. However, I assure you, its perfectly true. The first
adult mammal ever to be successfully cloned was named after her - Dolly
the superstar sheep. Why her creators likened her to Miss Parton is just
a tad more information than one needs to know. Let's just say they shared
a common quality!
It was in 1997 that scientists at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh
near Scotland took tissue from the udder of a six-year-old sheep and then
grew the tissue in culture in their laboratory. They then extracted the
nucleus - which contained a full copy of the sheep's DNA - out of one
of the cells. Meanwhile, they took a single unfertilised egg cell and
removed its nucleus, replacing it with the one taken from the original
sheep. This combination was allowed to grow and divide before being placed
in a third surrogate sheep, which would carry the foetus to term. After
two hundred and seventy-seven attempts, all went according to plan, and
Dolly was born.
It may sound complicated, but in actual fact, that's a highly simplified
version of the groundbreaking achievement of the Roslin group. Through
Dolly, they proved what, previously, had just been a theory - that the
DNA in differentiated cells is not irreversibly modified as the animal
grows. Or, in other words, it was feared that, although each cell of a
complex organism, such as humans, contains a complete DNA blueprint, by
design, it only uses the information it so requires and nothing else.
Skin cells only know how to be skin cells. Hypothetically speaking, the
cell, on learning its function, would then disregard the remaining genetic
information because they don't need it. If this were true, cloning would've
been impossible to perfect. What the Roslin group proved was that, no
matter what its purpose may have been, when a nucleus was placed in a
surrogate egg, it shed its sense of differentiation and yielded its genetic
information, allowing the egg to begin growing and dividing as if from
sexual conception. The cloning of complex animals was indeed possible.
And so we come to human cloning. Most leading geneticists believe that
human cloning is pointless, but there are those who have agendas other
than that of pure science. For example, Dr. Richard Seed, who has been
called "cloning's Kervorkian", announced in January 1998 that
he has plans to open a commercial cloning clinic near Chicago. Seed has
been quoted as saying "man will develop the technology and the science
and the capability to have an infinite life span". Ian Wilmut, a
member of the Roslin group, argues that human cloning involves some "serious
safety issues". But the technology is there. As NASA astronaut Jim
Lovell said of landing on the moon, "it wasn't a miracle, we just
decided to go." But human cloning is not a matter of "just deciding
to". It raises some serious ethical questions. Cloning threatens
to interfere with natural selection, which has ensured our survival as
a species.
Dolly snatched human cloning from the depths of science fiction and plunged
it into the realms of reality. Soon everyone had an opinion and then came
the inevitable fear. A line had been crossed, that much was certain, but
where exactly was that line and who knew what lay on the other side?
Was there anything positive cloning could do for us? In the future, it
could be used to detect hereditary diseases and other problems early on.
At present, a procedure called Blastomere Analysis before Implantation,
or BABI for short, allows couples to conceive several embryos in test
tubes before discarding those exhibiting known defects. But is this not
unlocking Pandora's box? Would prospective parents not eventually become
more and more selective? In time, would it not encourage people to select
embryos based on their likely stature, disposition or intelligence? There
is also the possibility of baby farming and cannibalising humans for spare
parts - clones bred for the exclusive purpose of donating body parts to
the victims of accidents, amputations or growth defects.
One must realise that if humans were cloned, they would not be the mindless
robots many of us visualise. They may appear to be physically identical
to someone, but inside they would be just like you or me, with a mind
and a soul and a heart. Genes may do the initial programming, but it is
a lifetime of experiences that shape the soul.
So, is cloning our ruin or our destiny? I'm afraid it seems that our
determination to unlock all of nature's secrets is leading us down a dangerous
path. The world marvelled when scientists first split the atom, but no
one was applauding on the 6th August 1945, when the atom bomb killed 40,000
people. It is perhaps too soon to envisage the places cloning could take
us, but one clear theme is already apparent.
Do we really want a future where our descendants will be able to pop
out of a Saturday morning to do a bit of shopping and come back with a
baby? Gone will be the days of Cabbage Patch Kids and Baby Borns - little
girls will have real live dolls to play with. And how will we feel, decades
down the road, knowing that the thorn in our side is from the tree we
planted?
It was R.W. Emerson who said that the "end of the human race will
be that it will eventually die of civilisation". Maybe he's right.
Maybe nature is keeping those secrets for a reason. Bio-ethicist Art Caplan
likens the science of cloning to the work of Marie Curie. If she had never
experimented with radium, we would never have had the atom bomb, and the
woman herself wouldn't have died of cancer. But then again, we wouldn't
have had X-rays either.
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