Lesbian partners DeShazo and Thomas, right, find the idea of cloning enticing
 

Monday, February 12, 2001

Baby, It's You! And You, And You...

Renegade scientists say they are ready to start applying the
technology of cloning to human beings. Can they really do it,
and how scary would that be?

BY NANCY GIBBS

Before we assume that the market for human clones consists
mainly of narcissists who think the world deserves more of
them or neo-Nazis who dream of cloning Hitler or crackpots
and mavericks and mischief makers of all kinds, it is worth
taking a tour of the marketplace. We might just meet ourselves
there.

Imagine for a moment that your daughter needs a bone-marrow
transplant and no one can provide a match; that your wife's
early menopause has made her infertile; or that your
five-year-old has drowned in a lake and your grief has made it
impossible to get your mind around the fact that he is gone
forever. Would the news then really be so easy to dismiss that
around the world, there are scientists in labs pressing ahead
with plans to duplicate a human being, deploying the same
technology that allowed Scottish scientists to clone Dolly the
sheep four years ago?

All it took was that first headline about the astonishing ewe,
and fertility experts began to hear the questions every day. Our
two-year-old daughter died in a car crash; we saved a lock of
her hair in a baby book. Can you clone her? Why does the law
allow people more freedom to destroy fetuses than to create
them? My husband had cancer and is sterile. Can you help us?

The inquiries are pouring in because some scientists are ever
more willing to say yes, perhaps we can. Last month a
well-known infertility specialist, Panayiotis Zavos of the
University of Kentucky, announced that he and Italian
researcher Severino Antinori, the man who almost seven years
ago helped a 62-year-old woman give birth using donor eggs,
were forming a consortium to produce the first human clone.
Researchers in South Korea claim they have already created a
cloned human embryo, though they destroyed it rather than
implanting it in a surrogate mother to develop. Recent cover
stories in Wired and the New York Times Magazine tracked
the efforts of the Raelians, a religious group committed to,
among other things, welcoming the first extraterrestrials when
they appear. They intend to clone the cells of a dead
10-month-old boy whose devastated parents hope, in effect, to
bring him back to life as a newborn. The Raelians say they
have the lab and the scientists, and--most important,
considering the amount of trial and error involved--they say
they have 50 women lined up to act as surrogates to carry a
cloned baby to term.

Given what researchers have learned since Dolly, no one
thinks the mechanics of cloning are very hard: take a donor egg,
suck out the nucleus, and hence the DNA, and fuse it with, say,
a skin cell from the human being copied. Then, with the help of
an electrical current, the reconstituted cell should begin
growing into a genetic duplicate. "It's inevitable that someone
will try and someone will succeed," predicts Delores Lamb, an
infertility expert at Baylor University. The consensus among
biotechnology specialists is that within a few years--some
scientists believe a few months--the news will break of the
birth of the first human clone.

At that moment, at least two things will happen--one private,
one public. The meaning of what it is to be human--which until
now has involved, at the very least, the mysterious melding of
two different people's DNA--will shift forever, along with our
understanding of the relationship between parents and children,
means and ends, ends and beginnings. And as a result, the
conversation that has occupied scientists and ethicists for
years, about how much man should mess with nature when it
comes to reproduction, will drop onto every kitchen table,
every pulpit, every politician's desk. Our fierce national debate
over issues like abortion and euthanasia will seem tame and
transparent compared with the questions that human cloning
raises.

That has many scientists scared to death. Because even if all
these headlines are hype and we are actually far away from
seeing the first human clone, the very fact that at this moment,
the research is proceeding underground, unaccountable, poses
a real threat. The risk lies not just with potential babies born
deformed, as many animal clones are; not just with desperate
couples and cancer patients and other potential "clients" whose
hopes may be raised and hearts broken and life savings wiped
out. The immediate risk is that a backlash against renegade
science might strike at responsible science as well.

The more scared people are of some of this research, scientists
worry, the less likely they are to tolerate any of it. Yet
variations on cloning technology are already used in
biotechnology labs all across the country. It is these techniques
that will allow, among other things, the creation of cloned
herds of sheep and cows that produce medicines in their milk.
Researchers also hope that one day, the ability to clone adult
human cells will make it possible to "grow" new hearts and
livers and nerve cells.

But some of the same techniques could also be used to grow a
baby. Trying to block one line of research could impede
another and so reduce the chances of finding cures for ailments
such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, cancer and heart disease.
Were some shocking breakthrough in human cloning to cause
"an overcompensatory response by legislators," says
Rockefeller University cloning expert Tony Perry, "that could
be disastrous. At some point, it will potentially cost lives." So
we are left with choices and trade-offs and a need to think
through whether it is this technology that alarms us or just
certain ways of using it.

By day, Randolfe Wicker, 63, runs a lighting shop in New
York City. But in his spare time, as spokesman for the Human
Cloning Foundation, he is the face of cloning fervor in the U.S.
"I took one step in this adventure, and it took over me like
quicksand," says Wicker. He is planning to have some of his
skin cells stored for future cloning. "If I'm not cloned before I
die, my estate will be set up so that I can be cloned after," he
says, admitting, however, that he hasn't found a lawyer willing
to help. "It's hard to write a will with all these uncertainties,"
he concedes. "A lot of lawyers will look at me crazy."

As a gay man, Wicker has long been frustrated that he cannot
readily have children of his own; as he gets older, his desire to
reproduce grows stronger. He knows that a clone would not be
a photocopy of him but talks about the traits the boy might
possess: "He will like the color blue, Middle Eastern food and
romantic Spanish music that's out of fashion." And then he hints
at the heart of his motive. "I can thumb my nose at Mr. Death
and say, 'You might get me, but you're not going to get all of
me,'" he says. "The special formula that is me will live on into
another lifetime. It's a partial triumph over death. I would leave
my imprint not in sand but in cement."

This kind of talk makes ethicists conclude that even people
who think they know about cloning--let alone the rest of
us--don't fully understand its implications. Cloning, notes
ethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania, "can't
make you immortal because clearly the clone is a different
person. If I take twins and shoot one of them, it will be faint
consolation to the dead one that the other one is still running
around, even though they are genetically identical. So the road
to immortality is not through cloning."

Still, cloning is the kind of issue so confounding that you envy
the purists at either end of the argument. For the Roman
Catholic Church, the entire question is one of world view:
whether life is a gift of love or just one more industrial
product, a little more valuable than most. Those who believe
that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception think
it is fine for God to make clones; he does it about 4,000 times a
day, when a fertilized egg splits into identical twins. But when
it comes to massaging a human life, for the scientist to do
mechanically what God does naturally is to interfere with his
work, and no possible benefit can justify that presumption.

On the other end of the argument are the libertarians who don't
like politicians or clerics or ethics boards interfering with
what they believe should be purely individual decisions.
Reproduction is a most fateful lottery; in their view, cloning
allows you to hedge your bet. While grieving parents may be
confused about the technology--cloning, even if it works, is not
resurrection--their motives are their own business. As for
infertile couples, "we are interested in giving people the gift of
life," Zavos, the aspiring cloner, told TIME this week. "Ethics
is a wonderful word, but we need to look beyond the ethical
issues here. It's not an ethical issue. It's a medical issue. We
have a duty here. Some people need this to complete the life
cycle, to reproduce."

In the messy middle are the vast majority of people who view
the prospect with a vague alarm, an uneasy sense that science
is dragging us into dark woods with no paths and no easy way
to turn back. Ian Wilmut, the scientist who cloned Dolly but has
come out publicly against human cloning, was not trying to help
sheep have genetically related children. "He was trying to help
farmers produce genetically improved sheep," notes Hastings
Center ethicist Erik Parens. "And surely that's how the
technology will go with us too." Cloning, Parens says, "is not
simply this isolated technique out there that a few deluded
folks are going to avail themselves of, whether they think it is a
key to immortality or a way to bring someone back from the
dead. It's part of a much bigger project. Essentially the
big-picture question is, To what extent do we want to go down
the path of using reproductive technologies to genetically shape
our children?"

At the moment, the American public is plainly not ready to
move quickly on cloning. In a TIME/CNN poll last week, 90%
of respondents thought it was a bad idea to clone human beings.
"Cloning right now looks like it's coming to us on a magic
carpet, piloted by a cult leader, sold to whoever can afford it,"
says ethicist Caplan. "That makes people nervous."

And it helps explain why so much of the research is being done
secretly. We may learn of the first human clone only months,
even years, after he or she is born--if the event hasn't happened
already, as some scientists speculate. The team that cloned
Dolly waited until she was seven months old to announce her
existence. Creating her took 277 tries, and right up until her
birth, scientists around the world were saying that cloning a
mammal from an adult cell was impossible. "There's a
significant gap between what scientists are willing to talk
about in public and their private aspirations," says British
futurist Patrick Dixon. "The law of genetics is that the work is
always significantly further ahead than the news. In the digital
world, everything is hyped because there are no moral
issues--there is just media excitement. Gene technology creates
so many ethical issues that scientists are scared stiff of a public
reaction if the end results of their research are known."

Of course, attitudes often change over time. In-vitro
fertilization was effectively illegal in many states 20 years ago,
and the idea of transplanting a heart was once considered
horrifying. Public opinion on cloning will evolve just as it did
on these issues, advocates predict. But in the meantime, the
crusaders are mostly driven underground. Princeton biologist
Lee Silver says fertility specialists have told him that they have
no problem with cloning and would be happy to provide it as a
service to their clients who could afford it. But these same
specialists would never tell inquiring reporters that, Silver
says--it's too hot a topic right now. "I think what's happened is
that all the mainstream doctors have taken a hands-off approach
because of this huge public outcry. But I think what they are
hoping is that some fringe group will pioneer it and that it will
slowly come into the mainstream and then they will be able to
provide it to their patients."

All it will take, some predict, is that first snapshot. "Once you
have a picture of a normal baby with 10 fingers and 10 toes,
that changes everything," says San Mateo, Calif., attorney and
cloning advocate Mark Eibert, who gets inquiries from infertile
couples every day. "Once they put a child in front of the
cameras, they've won." On the other hand, notes Gregory
Pence, a professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama
at Birmingham and author of Who's Afraid of Human Cloning?,
"if the first baby is defective, cloning will be banned for the
next 100 years."

"I wouldn't mind being the first person cloned if it were free. I
don't mind being a guinea pig," says Doug Dorner, 35. He and
his wife Nancy both work in health care. "We're not afraid of
technology," he says. Dorner has known since he was 16 that
he would never be able to have children the old-fashioned
way. A battle with lymphoma left him sterile, so when he and
Nancy started thinking of having children, he began following
the scientific developments in cloning more closely. The more
he read, the more excited he got. "Technology saved my life
when I was 16," he says, but at the cost of his fertility. "I think
technology should help me have a kid. That's a fair trade."

Talk to the Dorners, and you get a glimpse of choices that most
parents can scarcely imagine having to make. Which parent, for
instance, would they want to clone? Nancy feels she would be
bonded to the child just from carrying him, so why not let the
child have Doug's genetic material? Does it bother her to know
she would, in effect, be raising her husband as a little boy? "It
wouldn't be that different. He already acts like a five-year-old
sometimes," she says with a laugh.

How do they imagine raising a cloned child, given the
knowledge they would have going in? "I'd know exactly what
his basic drives were," says Doug. The boy's dreams and
aspirations, however, would be his own, Doug insists. "I used
to dream of being a fighter pilot," he recalls, a dream lost when
he got cancer. While they are at it, why not clone Doug twice?
"Hmm. Two of the same kid," Doug ponders. "We'll cross that
bridge when we come to it. But I know we'd never clone our
clone to have a second child. Once you start copying
something, who knows what the next copies will be like?"

In fact the risks involved with cloning mammals are so great
that Wilmut, the premier cloner, calls it "criminally
irresponsible" for scientists to be experimenting on humans
today. Even after four years of practice with animal cloning,
the failure rate is still overwhelming: 98% of embryos never
implant or die off during gestation or soon after birth. Animals
that survive can be nearly twice as big at birth as is normal, or
have extra-large organs or heart trouble or poor immune
systems. Dolly's "mother" was six years old when she was
cloned. That may explain why Dolly's cells show signs of
being older than they actually are--scientists joked that she was
really a sheep in lamb's clothing. This deviation raises the
possibility that beings created by cloning adults will age
abnormally fast.

"We had a cloned sheep born just before Christmas that was
clearly not normal," says Wilmut. "We hoped for a few days it
would improve and then, out of kindness, we euthanized it,
because it obviously would never be healthy." Wilmut believes
"it is almost a certainty" that cloned human children would be
born with similar maladies. Of course, we don't euthanize
babies. But these kids would probably die very prematurely
anyway. Wilmut pauses to consider the genie he has released
with Dolly and the hopes he has raised. "It seems such a
profound irony," he says, "that in trying to make a copy of a
child who has died tragically, one of the most likely outcomes
is another dead child."

That does not seem to deter the scientists who work on the
Clonaid project run by the Raelian sect. They say they are
willing to try to clone a dead child. Though their outfit is easy
to mock, they may be even further along than the competition, in
part because they have an advantage over other teams. A
formidable obstacle to human cloning is that donor eggs are a
rare commodity, as are potential surrogate mothers, and the
Raelians claim to have a supply of both.

Earlier this month, according to Brigitte Boisselier, Clonaid's
scientific director, somewhere in North America, a young
woman walked into a Clonaid laboratory whose location is
kept secret. Then, in a procedure that has been done thousands
of times, a doctor inserted a probe, removed 15 eggs from the
woman's ovaries and placed them in a chemical soup. Last
week two other Clonaid scientists, according to the group,
practiced the delicate art of removing the genetic material from
each of the woman's eggs. Within the next few weeks, the
Raelian scientific team plans to place another cell next to the
enucleated egg.

This second cell, they say, comes from a 10-month-old boy
who died during surgery. The two cells will be hit with an
electrical charge, according to the scenario, and will fuse,
forming a new hybrid cell that no longer has the genes of the
young woman but now has the genes of the dead child. Once the
single cell has developed into six to eight cells, the next step is
to follow the existing, standard technology of assisted
reproduction: gingerly insert the embryo into a woman's womb
and hope it implants. Clonaid scientists expect to have
implanted the first cloned human embryo in a surrogate mother
by next month.

Even if the technology is basic, and even if it appeals to some
infertile couples, should grieving parents really be pursuing
this route? "It's a sign of our growing despotism over the next
generation," argues University of Chicago bioethicist Leon
Kass. Cloning introduces the possibility of parents' making
choices for their children far more fundamental than whether to
give them piano lessons or straighten their teeth. "It's not just
that parents will have particular hopes for these children," says
Kass. "They will have expectations based on a life that has
already been lived. What a thing to do--to carry on the life of a
person who has died."

The libertarians are ready with their answers. "I think we're
hypercritical about people's reasons for having children," says
Pence. "If they want to re-create their dead children, so what?"
People have always had self-serving reasons for having
children, he argues, whether to ensure there's someone to care
for them in their old age or to relive their youth vicariously.
Cloning is just another reproductive tool; the fact that it is not a
perfect tool, in Pence's view, should not mean it should be
outlawed altogether. "We know there are millions of girls who
smoke and drink during pregnancy, and we know what the risks
to the fetus are, but we don't do anything about it," he notes. "If
we're going to regulate cloning, maybe we should regulate that
too."

Olga Tomusyak was two weeks shy of her seventh birthday
when she fell out of the window of her family's apartment. Her
parents could barely speak for a week after she died. "Life is
empty without her," says her mother Tanya, a computer
programmer in Sydney, Australia. "Other parents we have
talked to who have lost children say it will never go away."
Olga's parents cremated the child before thinking of the cloning
option. All that remains are their memories, some strands of
hair and three baby teeth, so they have begun investigating
whether the teeth could yield the nuclei to clone her one day.
While it is theoretically possible to extract DNA from the
teeth, scientists say it is extremely unlikely.

"You can't expect the new baby will be exactly like her. We
know that is not possible," says Tanya. "We think of the clone
as her twin or at least a baby who will look like her." The
parents would consider the new little girl as much Olga's baby
as their own. "Anything that grows from her will remind us of
her," says Tanya. Though she and her husband are young
enough to have other children, for now, this is the child they
want.

Once parents begin to entertain the option of holding on to
some part of a child, why would the reverse not be true? "Bill"
is a guidance counselor in Southern California, a
fortysomething expectant father who has been learning
everything he can about the process of cloning. But it is not a
lost child he is looking to replicate. He is interested in cloning
his mother, who is dying of pancreatic cancer. He has talked to
her husband, his siblings, everyone except her doctor--and her,
for fear that it will make her think they have given up hope on
her. He confides, "We might end up making a decision without
telling her."

His goal is to extract a tissue specimen from his mother while
it's still possible and store it, to await the day
when--if--cloning becomes technically safe and socially
acceptable. Late last week, as his mother's health weakened,
the family began considering bringing up the subject with her
because they need her cooperation to take the sample.
Meanwhile, Bill has already contacted two labs about tissue
storage, one as a backup. "I'm in touch with a couple of
different people who might be doing that," he says, adding that
both are in the U.S. "It seems like a little bit of an underground
movement, you know--people are a little reluctant that if they
announce it, they might be targeted, like the abortion clinics."

If Bill's hopes were to materialize and the clone were born,
who would that person be? "It wouldn't be my mother but a
person who would be very similar to my mother, with certain
traits. She has a lot of great traits: compassion and intelligence
and looks," he says. And yet, perhaps inevitably, he talks as
though this is a way to rewind and replay the life of someone
he loves. "She really didn't have the opportunities we had in
the baby-boom generation, because her parents experienced the
Depression and the war," he says. "So the feeling is that maybe
we could give her some opportunities that she didn't have. It
would be sort of like we're taking care of her now. You know
how when your parents age and everything shifts, you start
taking care of them? Well, this would be an extension of that."

A world in which cloning is commonplace confounds every
human relationship, often in ways most potential clients haven't
considered. For instance, if a woman gives birth to her own
clone, is the child her daughter or her sister? Or, says
bioethicist Kass, "let's say the child grows up to be the spitting
image of its mother. What impact will that have on the
relationship between the father and his child if that child looks
exactly like the woman he fell in love with?" Or, he continues,
"let's say the parents have a cloned son and then get divorced.
How will the mother feel about seeing a copy of the person she
hates most in the world every day? Everyone thinks about
cloning from the point of view of the parents. No one looks at it
from the point of view of the clone."

If infertile couples avoid the complications of choosing which
of them to clone and instead look elsewhere for their DNA,
what sorts of values govern that choice? Do they pick an uncle
because he's musical, a willing neighbor because she's
brilliant? Through that door lies the whole unsettling debate
about designer babies, fueled already by the commercial sperm
banks that promise genius DNA to prospective parents. Sperm
banks give you a shot at passing along certain traits; cloning all
but assures it.

Whatever the moral quandaries, the one-stop-shopping aspect
of cloning is a plus to many gay couples. Lesbians would have
the chance to give birth with no male involved at all; one
woman could contribute the ovum, the other the DNA.
Christine DeShazo and her partner Michele Thomas of
Miramar, Fla., have been in touch with Zavos about producing
a baby this way. Because they have already been ostracized as
homosexuals, they aren't worried about the added social sting
that would come with cloning. "Now [people] would say, 'Not
only are you a lesbian, you are a cloning lesbian,'" says
Thomas. As for potential health problems, "I would love our
baby if its hand was attached to its head," she says. DeShazo
adds, "If it came out green, I would love it. Our little alien..."

Just as women have long been able to have children without a
male sexual partner, through artificial insemination, men could
potentially become dads alone: replace the DNA from a donor
egg with one's own and then recruit a surrogate mother to carry
the child. Some gay-rights advocates even argue that should
sexual preference prove to have a biological basis, and should
genetic screening lead to terminations of gay embryos,
homosexuals would have an obligation to produce gay children
through cloning.

All sorts of people might be attracted to the idea of the ultimate
experiment in single parenthood. Jack Barker, a marketing
specialist for a corporate-relocation company in Minneapolis,
is 36 and happily unmarried. "I've come to the conclusion that I
don't need a partner but can still have a child," he says. "And a
clone would be the perfect child to have because I know
exactly what I'm getting." He understands that the child would
not be a copy of him. "We'd be genetically identical," says
Barker. "But he wouldn't be raised by my parents--he'd be
raised by me." Cloning, he hopes, might even let him improve
on the original: "I have bad allergies and asthma. It would be
nice to have a kid like you but with those improvements."

Cloning advocates view the possibilities as a kind of liberation
from travails assumed to be part of life: the danger that your
baby will be born with a disease that will kill him or her, the
risk that you may one day need a replacement organ and die
waiting for it, the helplessness you feel when confronted with
unbearable loss. The challenge facing cloning pioneers is to
make the case convincingly that the technology itself is not
immoral, however immorally it could be used.

One obvious way is to point to the broader benefits. Thus
cloning proponents like to attach themselves to the whole arena
of stem-cell research, the brave new world of inquiry into how
the wonderfully pliable cells of seven-day-old embryos
behave. Embryonic stem cells eventually turn into every kind
of tissue, including brain, muscle, nerve and blood. If scientists
could harness their powers, these cells could serve as the
body's self-repair kit, providing cures for Parkinson's,
diabetes, Alzheimer's and paralysis. Actors Christopher
Reeve, paralyzed by a fall from a horse, and Michael J. Fox,
who suffers from Parkinson's, are among those who have
pushed Congress to overturn the government's restrictions on
federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research.

But if the cloners want to climb on this train in hopes of riding
it to a public relations victory, the mainstream scientists want
to push them off. Because researchers see the potential benefits
of understanding embryonic stem cells as immense, they are
intent on avoiding controversy over their use. Being linked
with the human-cloning activists is their nightmare. Says
Michael West, president of Massachusetts-based Advanced
Cell Technology, a biotech company that uses cloning
technology to develop human medicines: "We're really
concerned that if someone goes off and clones a Raelian, there
could be an overreaction to this craziness--especially by
regulators and Congress. We're desperately concerned--and it's
a bad metaphor--about throwing the baby out with the bath
water."

Scientists at ACT are leery of revealing too much about their
animal-cloning research, much less their work on human
embryos. "What we're doing is the first step toward cloning a
human being, but we're not cloning a human being," says West.
"The miracle of cloning isn't what people think it is. Cloning
allows you to make a genetically identical copy of an animal,
yes, but in the eyes of a biologist, the real miracle is seeing a
skin cell being put back into the egg cell, taking it back in time
to when it was an undifferentiated cell, which then can turn into
any cell in the body." Which means that new, pristine tissue
could be grown in labs to replace damaged or diseased parts
of the body. And since these replacement parts would be
produced using skin or other cells from the suffering patient,
there would be no risk of rejection. "That means you've solved
the age-old problem of transplantation," says West. "It's huge."

So far, the main source of embryonic stem cells is "leftover"
embryos from IVF clinics; cloning embryos could provide an
almost unlimited source. Progress could come even faster if
Congress were to lift the restrictions on federal funding--which
might have the added safety benefit of the federal oversight that
comes with federal dollars. "We're concerned about George
W.'s position and whether he'll let existing guidelines stay in
place," says West. "People are begging to work on those
cells."

That impulse is enough to put the Roman Catholic Church in
full revolt; the Vatican has long condemned any research that
involves creating and experimenting with human embryos, the
vast majority of which inevitably perish. The church believes
that the soul is created at the moment of conception, and that the
embryo is worthy of protection. It reportedly took 104 attempts
before the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, was born; cloning
Dolly took more than twice that. Imagine, say opponents, how
many embryos would be lost in the effort to clone a human.
This loss is mass murder, says David Byers, director of the
National Conference of Catholic Bishops' commission on
science and human values. "Each of the embryos is a human
being simply by dint of its genetic makeup."

Last week 160 bishops and five Cardinals met for three days
behind closed doors in Irving, Texas, to wrestle with the issues
biotechnology presents. But the cloning debate does not break
cleanly even along religious lines. "Rebecca," a
thirtysomething San Francisco Bay Area resident, spent seven
years trying to conceive a child with her husband. Having
"been to hell and back" with IVF treatment, Rebecca is now as
thoroughly committed to cloning as she is to Christianity. "It's
in the Bible--be fruitful and multiply," she says. "People say,
'You're playing God.' But we're not. We're using the raw
materials the good Lord gave us. What does the doctor do
when the heart has stopped? They have to do direct massage of
the heart. You could say the doctor is playing God. But we
save a life. With human cloning, we're not so much saving a
life as creating a new being by manipulation of the raw
materials, DNA, the blueprint for life. You're simply using it in
a more creative manner."

A field where emotions run so strong and hope runs so deep is
fertile ground for profiteers and charlatans. In her effort to
clone her daughter Olga, Tanya Tomusyak contacted an
Australian firm, Southern Cross Genetics, which was founded
three years ago by entrepreneur Graeme Sloan to preserve
DNA for future cloning. In an e-mail, Sloan told the parents
that Olga's teeth would provide more than enough DNA--even
though that possibility is remote. "All DNA samples are placed
into computer-controlled liquid-nitrogen tanks for long-term
storage," he wrote. "The cost of doing a DNA fingerprint and
genetic profile and placing the sample into storage would be
$2,500. Please note that all of our fees are in U.S. dollars."

When contacted by TIME, Sloan admitted, "I don't have a
scientific background. I'm pure business. I'd be lying if I said I
wasn't here to make a dollar out of it. But I would like to see
organ cloning become a reality." He was inspired to launch the
business, he says, after a young cousin died of leukemia.
"There's megadollars involved, and everyone is racing to be
the first," he says. As for his own slice of the pie, Sloan says
he just sold his firm to a French company, which he refuses to
name, and he was heading for Hawaii last week. The Southern
Cross factory address turns out to be his mother's house, and
his "office" phone is answered by a man claiming to be his
brother David--although his mother says she has no son by that
name.

The more such peddlers proliferate, the more politicians will
be tempted to invoke prohibitions. Four states--California,
Louisiana, Michigan and Rhode Island--have already banned
human cloning, and this spring Texas may become the fifth.
Republican state senator Jane Nelson has introduced a bill in
Austin that would impose a fine of as much as $1 million for
researchers who use cloning technology to initiate pregnancy in
humans. The proposed Texas law would permit
embryonic-stem-cell research, but bills proposed in other
states were so broadly written that they could have stopped
those activities too.

"The short answer to the cloning question," says ethicist
Caplan, "is that anybody who clones somebody today should
be arrested. It would be barbaric human experimentation. It
would be killing fetuses and embryos for no purpose, none,
except for curiosity. But if you can't agree that that's wrong to
do, and if the media can't agree to condemn rather than gawk,
that's a condemnation of us all."