If those clamoring for laws to ban the cloning of human beings were looking for someone to scare the dickens out of people, they couldn’t do much better than to create an eccentric doctor and name him Seed.
In fact, here he is, Dr. Richard Seed, the renegade Chicago-area scientist who a month ago quite casually unveiled a proposal to start cloning humans and eventually set up clinics that would become something like genetic Fotomats. His remarks were largely ignored at the time, but a radio interview this week has suddenly touched off national interest.
Seed could be written off as an eccentric. Yet even if it seems quite remote that his clinics will actually become the genesis of human cloning, the attention he has generated serves a purpose. The ethics of human cloning deserves more public discussion.
A Harvard-trained physicist who began to dabble in reproductive technology 20 years ago, Seed skates between the arenas of credible science, pseudo-religious babbling about fulfilling God’s plan and delusions about winning a Nobel Prize.
Seed’s real-life existence is far less exciting. A bank foreclosed on the couple’s Oak Park house and evicted them last July. He has been renting lab space from the University of Illinois at Chicago and experimenting on mice that he gets for 19 cents a day. He says he has a few thousand dollars committed to his cloning experiments and only needs “a few million more.”
Not exactly a dazzling curriculum vitae. Still, his cloning scheme has received an avalanche of publicity, including resounding condemnations from the White House and congressional leaders.
The reason is that human cloning–the exact reproduction of an individual–raises scientific and moral issues far beyond those of methods in which science assists humans in the fertilization of an egg. Dolly the sheep was cloned only after 277 failures, and many of the failures were frightening, including creatures with multiple organs and other deformities. It is one thing to botch the creation of a sheep; quite another to botch the creation of a human being.
It was hoped, after Dolly, that the medical research community would erect safeguards to ensure the issues of human cloning would be resolved before experimentation began–indeed, if experimentation were ever deemed proper. No doubt the prospect of someone such as Seed jumping to be first will prompt a new impetus for legislation to ban human cloning.
Seed says four infertile couples already have volunteered to try cloning and assures us it’s all going to be “fun.” Then comes the chilling part: He says that he can’t wait to make two or three clones of himself.
