With the development of the in vitro fertilization technique. Opponents warned that this would lead to cloning. But in the 70s the great fear was that in vitro fertilization would fail and end in the birth of abnormal children. The great fear about cloning is its success
Robin Marantz Hennig New York Times
Recently, we have watched scientists push each other in their race towards something that to the rest of humans seems like crossing all boundaries: the world's first human clone. Three groups claim to be in the midst of developing clones.
Severino Antinori, an Italian doctor, said that his cloned baby would be born first. Antinori, who became famous in 94 when he helped a 62-year-old woman conceive by transplanting a fertilized egg from a donor into her womb, said he is treating the pregnancy of a cloned baby in Israel whose name has not been pierced, due to be born in January.
Paniotis Michael Zavos of Kentucky, Antinori's former partner and now his sworn enemy, says he does not believe him. Zavos, an embryologist by profession, says that he has collected cells from seven people who want to be cloned, and in January he will transplant the cell nuclei into donated eggs from which the original nuclei have been removed. He promises that, unlike his opponent, he will present DNA that will prove that each of the babies is indeed an exact genetic copy of the parent.
And according to the chief scientist of the Haralim - a sect that believes that the first humans were cloned by intelligent beings from space 25 thousand years ago - Brigitte Boaslia, they now have five cloned pregnancies. These claims raise moral, religious and social questions. Perhaps the fact that we were already in this story will help us answer them.
One of the first steps down the slope was made a generation ago, with the development of the in vitro fertilization technique. Opponents warned that this would lead to cloning. But in the 70s the great fear was that in vitro fertilization would fail and end in the birth of abnormal children. The great fear about cloning is its success.
It is amazing how similar the arguments of that time are to those of today: that the child's unnatural beginning could lead to genetic complications; that it took hundreds of animal experiments to achieve one success, so that human research would involve hundreds of potential embryos being discarded in the laboratory; that the animals born in this way suffered from a chromosomal anomaly or aged prematurely, that a terrible burden would be placed on the children born in this bizarre way, and more.
Some of the arguments are true: there have been many failures. But most of the predictions did not come true. It does not seem, for example, that children who were test-tube babies have complications - not after Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, was so happily welcomed in July 1978.
The moral and religious arguments against cloning are also reminiscent of what was said about in vitro fertilization. We argued that it threatens the fabric of civilization: marriage, family values, our sense of identity. All strings will be untied, they warned. But they did not unravel, and if they did - not because of the in vitro fertilization.
The analogy is not perfect of course. In vitro fertilization imitates nature, not undermining it. Only the place of union of the egg and the sperm changes. Cloning, on the other hand, renders irrelevant the purpose of sexual reproduction - combining the genetic heritage of one mother and one father into a new and unique life.
In 2002, after half a million normal and beloved IVF babies were born, we can see how relatively harmless IVF is. But she didn't look like that in the 70s. We can't know today how the story of human cloning will end. But just as the collective attitude towards in-vitro fertilization was reversed after the first test-tube babies were found to be normal, there could be a parallel development in the attitude towards genetic technologies and reproductive techniques that now seem strange - not only cloning, but also manipulation that will change the cells so that our children are taller, for example.
Some of the techniques that seem unthinkable now can become so commonplace that they are taken for granted. Some of the genetic manipulation could eventually be done, as happened with in vitro fertilization, just for another part of the landscape in the strange world of genomes, genes and formation.
The author's book "Pandora's Baby", about the history of in vitro fertilization, will be published soon
