Four years after a scientist first successfully cloned a sheep, mankind is discovering how little it really knows about this new biological wonder.
Nearly every time an animal is cloned, some type of genetic problem occurs, the New York Times reported this week. Sometimes, the problems are obvious, as when a cloned animal is born with heart defects or an immune system that malfunctions. Other times, problems don't show up for a long time. One group of cloned mice, for example, seemed perfectly fine until the mice had matured to the human equivalent of about 30 years. Then, suddenly, they became grotesquely obese, despite a diet that was the same as that fed to other mice.
This evidence comes just in time. A group of scientists has been searching for a country that would allow them laboratory space in which to produce the world's first human clone. Until now, the arguments against human cloning were of a moral nature best understood by people with religious sensibilities. These arguments addressed the meaning of life and the worth of souls, which ought to outweigh the desirability of physical attributes or the creation of a type of super race. They dealt with the dangers of trying to manipulate life in ways that seem to mock the divine.
Now, however, the moral difficulties ought to be much starker and easier for everyone to understand. To engineer experiments that could create humans with horrible medical defects or genetic errors would be hideously irresponsible.
Scientists aren't sure what is causing the problems. To clone an animal, they must first remove the genetic material from an egg and insert a cell from an adult. The egg then somehow reprograms itself using the new genetic information, and it has to do this quickly before being fertilized. Scientists believe this quick process may lead some individual genes to go awry, creating random errors that could lead to deadly health problems.
Research is bound to continue, of course, and scientists may one day solve these problems. But then the world still will be left with the same old moral questions that have accompanied cloning from the beginning.
The research itself is not inherently bad. Neither is the science of genetic engineering, including cloning. Much good can come from research designed to eliminate diseases and improve the human condition. But the science is good only to the extend it is bound by solid moral judgment. The fear, justified by the pell-mell rush some seem to have to clone a human, is that wisdom is not keeping pace with technology.