The arrival of the cloned sheep Dolly seems to have taken the world by surprise. New York State rushed through an anti-cloning law, a French minister babbled about six-legged chickens and news editors dashed around looking for pictures of Hitler.
BBC reporters were visibly discomforted to find that Britain actually had better laws in place to stop human cloning than other countries, for this left them without their usual line of attack. But all were agreed that this news had come (in Bryan Appleyard's words) from left field. The first cloned animal was not expected for decades, if at all.
I beg to differ. The only surprising thing about Dolly was that she took us by surprise. I mean this on three levels: the news did not leak; cloning has been done before; and it is routine practice in parts of the animal kingdom. Dolly is already six months old and scores of people must have known about her. The Roslin Institute is obviously more leak-proof than the cabinet. The principle of cloning was established nearly 30 years ago when John Gurdon cloned a tadpole from the cell of an adult frog. And, on a more evolutionary scale, the possibility of cloning is all around us: dandelions do it. So do whiptail lizards, greenfly, amoebae, strawberry plants and yeast. Turkey embryos have developed in unfertilised eggs. If you had asked me whether cloning sheep would be possible, I would have unhesitatingly answered yes.
It so happens that our ancestors (who were also Dolly's) surrendered the ability to clone themselves between 200m and 400m years ago. Quite why they gave up remains a mystery, the most plausible explanation being that for large, long-lived creatures it is crucial to change the molecular locks every generation to keep parasites guessing. That requires sex.
This is not to detract from Dolly's importance. Predictable she may have been, she none the less represents the first asexually produced mammal that has ever lived (unless you count two sheep produced last year by cloning embryonic tissue). It is likely, despite what some have been arguing, that the technology which worked for sheep will eventually be made to work for human beings if we wish it to.
Should we then take cuttings of ourselves? The hurdles to be overcome are great. The technique has never yet worked with mice, because mice embryos begin differentiating much earlier in development than sheep embryos; human embryos are intermediate in this respect between mice and sheep. The cloned cell must still go through normal development within a womb, which for now requires the cloner to find a willing mother for their twin (and thus makes it probable that the first cloner will be a woman). And the Roslin Institute's technique has a success rate of less than 0.5 per cent.
But these are small hurdles compared with the gigantic leap of establishing that adult mammal cells contain sufficient information to develop into new individuals. Cloned human beings are possible; getting there is a matter of elbow grease, not genius. Should we greet the prospect with delight or horror?
Imagine first the medical reasons why we might want to clone ourselves. We might grow the clone as a nerveless laboratory tissue: a spare supply of bone marrow, a skin graft or even-a long way in the future-a whole spare organ such as a liver. Genetically identical tissue is far less likely to be rejected than tissue from another person, even a sibling. People have already borne children with the specific intention of using them as bone marrow donors for their ill siblings. Ethically, cloning is no different.
Cloning a whole person has fewer advantages, but it still has some. An infertile or gay person could have a family without recourse to a strange donor. A soon to be bereaved family could start again with a genetically (almost) identical child. Alice Thomas Ellis, writing as a bereaved parent in the Sunday Telegraph, says she would never have wanted this, but that is up to her. Others might think differently.
A temporary embargo on human cloning may be a good idea while we rethink these questions. But it would be a mistake to rush to ban cloning, because I cannot imagine what harm it could do commensurate with these advantages. Some say dictators would clone themselves, but so what? Dictators do not need clones to carry out their cruel policies: enthusiastic fans do fine. The much invoked Hitler did not murder the Jews because of eugenics; he took up eugenics to justify murdering Jews. It is so obvious that it hardly needs repeating: if dictators abuse absolute power, don't give it to them. The cure for future Hitlers is not to deprive the rest of us of technologies that they might abuse, but to deprive everybody of the chance to become a dictator.
Yet Dolly's arrival has not been greeted as a great advance, but as a threat. Cloned people are talked of with almost universal horror. What is it about the modern age that makes us so pessimistic? Technology is responsible for our stunning modern prosperity. Thanks to it we live long lives full of interest, plenty, comfort and health, unimaginable to anybody born a century ago. For those who doubt that, let them ponder one word: dentistry.
Yet we continue to greet each new breakthrough in technology with gloom. We always have, as a reading of newspapers in the age of the first railways would show. Only briefly, in the 1950s, did we shake off this pessimism and show a brief and uncharacteristic technophilia.
We have greeted every advance in genetics-the railway of our day-with foreboding. But what harm has genetics done to justify this fear? None. It has helped feed the world, begun to produce exciting new drugs, tracked down the cause of many inherited diseases, allowing us to test for them in advance and then cure them, and opened a book-called the genome-of such fascination that it will take most of the next millennium to read it. Medical technology-from transplants to in vitro fertilisation-has given people new hope of life and yet has always been greeted with horror.
There is, as yet, no down side. No genetic experiment has produced anything evil or uncontrollable. It will one day, no doubt, just as railways have produced rail accidents and computers have produced computer crime: all technologies can be misused. But genetic technology has had 25 years to be abused and it is not happening. Instead of rushing to decide that cloning humans is unethical, we should pause to remember how unethical it is to deny people a technology that might improve their health.
Cloning is a technology that might have vital implications for the individual and few implications for society as a whole: the opposite of nuclear power. The abandonment of sex might be disastrous for the species, but only if the whole species consisted of clones of one or a few individuals. Individualism would prevent that: clones will always be rare, and will always be different from each other. So the issue of cloning shows the need, not for yet more regulation and state control, but for more individualism. Let everybody do what he or she wishes and who is worse off? I am not harmed by somebody else's decision to clone themselves-be they a leukaemia patient, a gay person, or the late Lord Moynihan.
Suppose that government does regulate human cloning and in 20 years' time, after much success with racehorses and dairy cattle, it decides that it will allow the creation of one human clone. Who would it choose? The debate would rage for weeks in the media. One side would argue for the cloning of a great individual. The England centre forward, recently bought by Seoul United for $150m, would be mentioned. Think what a talent he could be if we reared him from birth in full knowledge of his innate ability! Another side would argue that the opportunity must go to a representative of the needy: an impoverished lesbian with PC views. What a way to make the decision.
It would be far more humane to leave such matters in the hands of the individual. Our bodies and our genes belong to ourselves as individuals not collectives such as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. To regulate is to nationalise. The British are in an authoritarian mood these days, always calling for new restrictions on individual freedom. They need to rediscover the libertarian instincts that were once their hallmark.
There is, however, a more interesting question that Dolly raises: the question of immortality. There are good reasons to believe that she will grow old very rapidly. As Dr Ian Wilmut, Dolly's creator, puts it, she may really be six and a half years old, because her mother was six when the cell was taken.
She thus revives a bizarre debate that raged unresolved at the turn of this century. A cloned colony of protozoa kept in a flask will eventually grow old, feeble and die, just like an individual. Some argued that this was just because of deteriorating conditions; others claimed that it was due to a basic property of life; deprived of sex, organisms grow old and die. Sex, according to the latter camp, has a rejuvenating effect on the lineage.
One protagonist in the debate was the German biologist August Weismann. He noticed that we are descended not from our parents' bodies but from their germ cells, a special line of cells that remains distinct throughout development of the embryonic and adult body, and seems to be immortal, immune to senescence. This is the reason that we do not inherit our parents' experiences, but their possibilities (or, as we now put it, their genes).
Cloning loses the rejuvenating effect of sex. Unless we can reinvent that effect ourselves, we may produce rapidly senescing clones. To make a clone from a 60-year-old and produce a child who would suffer from rheumatism and greying hair by the age of 10 would be cruel. Until the question of senescence is settled, therefore, a voluntary moratorium on human cloning would be wise. But let us keep the matter in our own hands and not pass it to government.
