http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-1506-1479701-1506,00.html February 13, 2005
Welcome to the clone age Scientific advancement can only intensify the fierce moral and ethical debate surrounding biogenetics, writes William Peakin
When something is technically sweet you should just go ahead and do it, and argue the toss about its ethics only after you have enjoyed technical success. So, more or less, said Robert Oppenheimer, the founding director of the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory, when asked about the decision to make a thermonuclear bomb.
If this spirit of adventure characterised the work of physicists at the end of the second world war, it now imbues the biologists who are making our 21st-century world a safer - or more frightening, depending on your point of view - place.
None has been more controversial than the team at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh who, with the birth of Dolly the sheep on July 5, 1996, cloned the first mammal from an adult cell.
Their work has generated huge controversy, firing moral and ethical debates about dabbling in the stuff of life. Should we be allowed to create genetic copies of living things, even if their study means the prevention of disease? Can science be permitted to interfere with the genetic process, even if it allows us to discover we are at risk from disease? Last week, Professor Ian Wilmut and Dr Paul de Sousa from the Roslin Institute were granted a licence to generate embryonic stem cells - which have the potential to develop into any cell in the body - for the study of motor neurone disease which kills 1,200 people in Britain each year.
For those who suffer from the disease, or for their carers, the two scientists' proposal must sound beautiful. The nucleus from a skin or blood cell donated by somebody with the disease is inserted into an unfertilised egg that has had its own nucleus removed. The egg is then stimulated to grow into an embryo, from which stem cells are extracted.
If these stem cells can be turned into motor neurones (nerves that control movement), Wilmut, de Sousa and their team will have a unique chance to discover what causes the degenerative disease. The process does not represent the moral anathema of reproductive cloning, according to the defenders of the Roslin project. Once the stem cells are removed, the embryos are destroyed at 14 days. Yet the decision (it was not the first: a team at Newcastle University was granted a licence for therapeutic cloning last year) still provoked opposition.
"Human cloning remains dangerous, undesirable and unnecessary," said a representative of the organisation Comment on Reproductive Ethics, who insisted that alternative therapies already exist that provide safe and ethical solutions in this field of medicine.
The relative methods of gene therapy and these undefined alternative treatments have now been rendered something of a moot point. Instead, the question is where this growing body of knowledge is leading and what moral and ethical dilemmas we face.
We are not yet in the world of CBS Television's drama Century City, where grumpy employees can slap on "happy patches" to improve their moods and genetic engineering allows parents to decide the career of their children, yet this scenario, circa 2030, does not seem far-fetched today.
According to Dr Adrian Woolfson of Cambridge University's department of clinical biochemistry, today's questions will seem absurd in the not-too-distant future. They will be "akin to Victorian arguments about whether chloroform should be given to women in labour because it contradicted the Bible's prophecy that pain and suffering accompanied childbirth".
In his recently published book An Intelligent Person's Guide to Genetics, Woolfson highlights the work of Craig Ventor, the American scientist, who has successfully constructed a man-made virus and is now in the process of building the world's first artificial creature. The work represents a new type of biology, a synthetic process which aims not just to understand how living things work but to build them from scratch. Could then, asks Woolfson, a genetic genius not build a fairy, centaur, mermaid, dragon or unicorn? The suggestion of extraordinary possibilities is not uncommon among perfectly grounded scientists. A contemporary of Woolfson's at Cambridge, Aubrey de Gray in the genetics department, believes he has formulated the theoretical means by which human beings could live for thousands of years, perhaps even indefinitely. His work has been published in several respected scientific journals and he has been credited with new biological discoveries by the scientific community.
Ageing, says de Gray, is merely something "we need to fix". The process is a "reasonably small set of accumulating and eventually pathogenic (capable of causing disease) molecular and cellular changes in our bodies, each of which is potentially amenable to repair".
It is a philosophy that provokes some obvious moral questions, not least about overpopulation. Like the answers to other dilemmas posed to de Gray, his response is provocative: "There may well be some sort of population explosion, just as there was following the elimination of all those deaths (by Louis Pasteur's discoveries) - and we may respond by reducing the birth rate as quickly as we did then, or we may take longer - but the first priority is to end the slaughter. Everything else is detail.
"The Earth's population will probably grow quite rapidly in the period immediately after these treatments become available, and we'll be faced with a simple choice: either we use the treatments, live a long time and have very few children, or we carry on having children at the current rate and we avoid using the treatments, so that we carry on dying of old age just like now.
"I don't say that I know which choice society will make at that time. What I do say is that that era's population has the right to make that choice itself, and not to have it made for it by today's society."
Physics defined the 20th century and biology is defining the 21st; it appears we need to refine a new science, that of choice.
Being aware of a risk to our health, and thus being able to do something about it, would seem a natural desire. But should insurance companies be allowed to conduct bioprofiling? Should we be able to detect a genetic predisposition to criminality? The choice is ours.