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Clone: The Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead

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Clone: The Road to Dolly... is an interesting book outlining the research that contributed to the creation of the first mammalian clone and its philosophical implications.

There is much in the book to recommend it. It places the work in its correct historical context by describing the chain of discoveries, beginning with those in the early part of this century, that eventually led to Dolly.

However, the book is needlessly sensationalistic in the way it describes science and scientists, seeming to draw parallels with the worlds of power politics and showbiz. Science is really a more subdued and low-key affair - as exemplified by the very lab that created Dolly.

My major objection is that the book appears to take as its underlying assumption that the public (or a large segment) is opposed to science and treats its acheivements with profound suspicion. I agree that there exists a vocal minority that thinks this way and may have its roots in various fundamentalist movements. However, the majority of people that I have met, while frequently poorly informed, are not antagonistic to science, but rather are interested in enjoying the fruits of its labor. This may be why, as the book says, while various self-styled experts debate the ethics of cloning, infertile couples are lining up for possible medical applications. It is only when the public is either denied the benefits of science, or is not educated about what these benefits may be, that it grows resentful. This issue seems to have been overlooked. On the other hand, comparisons with the atomic bomb are abundant, though meaningless. The bomb has killed thousands and was created for that express purpose. Cloning has created very little and destroyed nothing, except a few egos.

Fortuneately, although the book begins grimly, it seems to end on a fairly optimistic note, moving away from its opening notions that cloning is an evil, dirty business.

The bottom line is that whatever else it may do, cloning does not undermine human dignity. A person's dignity arises from his or her actions, not whether they were born as a twin, testtube baby or clone. We would do well to remember that. To my mind, the most profound line in this book full of lines that compete for that honor is one attributed to a Scottish farmer who says, in some perplexity, 'I don't understand the big deal. A sheep is still a sheep.'

This is a very fine book, even if you don't have a burning desire to make copies of yourself. As Gina K helps us understand, cloning is just a huge metaphor for the complexity and wonder of modern biology. To the media, its a way to sell papers and ads. To the scientists, its sometimes a way to get grant money, and sometimes the path to the most important medical advances imaginable. And, to the public, its an opportunity to get excited and hopeful about the future of man, or resentful and apoplectic about the schemes of these bad, mad, godless scientists. And to the moral arbiters of science (mostly illustrious residents of Cambridge, MA) its a chance play premature Cassandras to a poorly-informed and suggestible public.

This must have been a difficult book to write, because a very complicated stage must be set; Kolata starts by reviewing the history of cloning, beginning roughly in the 50s with frog cloning (Briggs and King), then passing thru whackiness-posing-as-journalism (Rorvik), fraud posing as science (Illmensee) before arriving at genius in the person of a Faust-like Danish vetrinarian (Willadsen) and finally the methodical Scottish cloner himself (Wilmut).

Its obvious that Kolata's journalist/scientist heart belongs to Willadsen, who is the scientist we all wanted to be when we were grad students. Contemptuous of arbitrary authority and received wisdom, with golden hands and an inborn passion for the mysteries of cell, embryo and organism. Willadsen seems to be the genuine article - he makes me proud to be 1/8th Danish!

Read this book to see how science really happens. You'll thank me.

Looking for an accessible guide to cloning together with sex, scandal, a putative hoax, a fraud claim, counterclaims, industrial secrets and a cast of maverick scientists and myths that makes for a greatly entertaining true story ? To find a single book which has the potential to affect one's ideas and thoughts as to what it means to be human is a rarity, but some readers might be so affected by this work. Thematically weaving between the key historical developments leading to claims for the first cloning success using adult tissue and discussions of the moral ethics of whether and why such research be conducted, Kolata's account of the making of `Dolly' the sheep reminded me of Watson's `The Double helix'. Not only do we read here about the manipulation of genetic material outside the realms of human replication and fertility, we are continually provoked with the wider issues relating to food production processess, the social responsibilies of the research scientist, and the role of science journalism in informing public opinion.We are also exposed to the less attractive side of running the day-to-day life of the research laboratory - the struggle with grant competition; peer pressure, review and publication demands; conference attendance and institutional sponsor politics. Kolata provides all of this in a very well written and researched book including frank (and seemingly) honest biographies of the leading players in the `road to Dolly'. The story as presented here covers a period of just over one hundred years following Weismann's discovery of the `loss of information' with subsequent cellular differentiations of dividing tissue. Within twenty years or so the role of the cell nucleus had been determined, and by 1938, Spemann's `Embryonic Development and Induction' proposed the very nuclear transplant experiment that was to succeed some 60 years later. The first successful accounts of this technique involved the use of the embryonic frog tissue in the 1950s by Briggs & King, but the older, more differentiated cell' nuclei proved harder to handle and maintain. In the early 1960s, Gurdon succeeds with the transfer of what were thought to be adult, fully differentiated cells taken from amphibian intestines. At about the same time as these developments were unfolding, the first symposia to address the possibility of cloning and its implications for ethics had taken place. The end of the 1960s had seen the advent of gene isolation (though curiously little is said about the discovery of DNA itself and the significance of the newly founded growth area of molecular biology) and within the next ten years we had moved from the in vitro fertilisation of mice to Louise Brown, born in 1978. That same year saw the publication of a non-fiction book claiming that the real-life `rich, eccentric Max' has himself cloned with the assistance of a World renown scientist known by the pseudonym `Darwin' with the assistance of a seventeen year old virgin called `sparrow', who gives birth to a healthy baby boy. I would recommend reading Kolata for her retelling of the Rorvik (1978) story if for no other reason. The following year saw Illmensee claim to have cloned the first mice using the nucleus of embryonic stem cells and, again, we are both entertained and informed by Kolata's telling of this most remarkable tale of intrigue and collegiate suspicion of happenings in the laboratory. It was not until the 1980s` and 90s that successful sheep, cow and eventually monkey cloning was to be completed (all still using embryonic nuclear material transfer) at least suggesting that there was no in principle reason to believe adult cloning to be beyond possibility. However, very few scientists apparently held this latter belief - and these few were not encouraged to pursue their ideas. Now suitably brought up to speed with our history of embryology, experimental biology techniques and the sweat involved in conducting seemingly unglamorous basic laboratory science, we are finally introduced to Ian Wilmut, whose research group were to achieve what to many was still `biologically impossible'. Wilmut and his colleage Campbell postulated that the problem of cloning transplants was perhaps with tranfering the nuclear DNA at such a time inappropriate to the natural activity phases of the cell cycle. Campbell determined that the so colled G0 (G-nought) phase of the cell cycle was one of synchrony and, combined with the technique of halting induced by nutritional deprivation, thought that it was during this period that cell `reprogramming' would be more likely successful. In March, 1996 the first clones of a mammal (sheep) were born using differentiated embryonic cell nuclei, but their announcement was largely lost to the wider world outside that of a handful of agricultural scientists. However, in July of the same year, the first sheep cloned from the fully-differentiated cell nuclei of adult tissue was born to Wilmut's lab. However, the news that was to reach the world over had first to wait out a period of great secrecy and gossip-mongering. The (true) story is revealed lucidly here, and provides another reason to read Kolata's book. And yes, in this account she was named for Dolly Parton.

It's nearly a decade, since I read this book. While this work was NOT a book in which to search for a proper ethical analysis, NY Times reporter Gina Kolata provided a wonderfully readable narrative of cloning "science" up to "Dolly." I was particularly struck by certain of her inclusions:
* "Marie Antoinette Di Berardino, a serious woman who was a cloning pioneer, and who had been studying cloning in frogs since the 1950s, said she could imagine nothing that would justify cloning a human being: 'I'm coming from a Roman Catholic background, and I'm telling you, it' killing me,' she said. 'We have lost so much respect for human life in so many ways. I just have a fear that this may be taking a step too far'" (pp. 36, 37).
* "The early days of embryology were the days of the gentlemen scientists, dressed formally in coats and vests, and priding themselves on their worldly interests....those early embryologists sought the company and the comments of other great thinkers and purposely tried to envision their work in a philosophical context. Science and philosophy, in fact, were intermingled to such an extent that, [Washington University developmental biologist David] Kirk said, 'no serious scientist would think of publishing his results without trying to draw philosophical conclusions from them.' These scientists took the title Doctor of Philosophy very seriously. For much of the 19th century & in the early part of the 20th century, science was actually called natural philosophy. And 'at least until Darwin's time, a majority of biologists thought that what they were doing was elucidating God's handiwork, approaching the mind of God by studying His creations,' Kirk said" (pp. 48, 49).
* "The ethics movement had its roots in real scandals and moral dilemnas of teh late 1960s and early 1970s....IN order to develop a vaccine for Hepatitis B, doctors had purposely infected mentally retarded [sic] children at the Willowbrook State Hospital in Staten Island with the liver virus....The study eventually resulted in a vaccine against this incurable disease, but the damage to the public's perception of the morals of scientists was done....Once again, it seemed [sic], the weakest and most vulnerable were being used by scientists to advance their careers" (pp. 77, 78).
* President Clinton asked his National Bioethics Advisory Commission to respond to cloning's ethical and legal ramifications. At that time, the commission was chaired by Princeton University President Harold Shapiro. It was this same Harold Shapiro who picked Peter Singer for an endowed ethics chair at Princeton. Unbelievably, Peter Singer has maintained that human parents should be allowed to kill their newborns - up to several months. If the chair of this commission could pick such an individual for an endowed ethics chair, what sort of "credibility" could the commission of that era possibly claim? AS per Kolata, "the commission's final report suggested banning only the cloning of cells from people who had already been born, leaving the door open to many of the possibilities that the infertility doctors [sic] envisioned" (p. 244).
* "Steen Willadsen...[was a] Danish scientist who was the first to clone a sheep from a sheep embryo cell" (p.129). The follow three sentences of Kolata's text are as follows: "In the end, it may come down to a matter of semantics, Willadsen told me. Yes, he is pretty sure that humans will be intentionally cloned one day. But, he said, 'it probably will not be called cloning' (p.248).


As the Vatican's 2008 Instruction Dignitas Personae on Certain Bioethical Questions,
"Cloning is proposed for two basic purposes:
reproduction....
Therapeutic cloning...has been proposed as a way of producing embryonic stem cells with a predetermined genetic patrimony in order to overcome the problem of immune system rejection; this is therefore linked to the issue of the use of stem cells....

"Human cloning is intrinsically illicit in that, by taking the ethical negativity of techniques of artificial fertilization to their extreme, it seeks to give rise to a new human being without a connection to the act of reciprocal self-giving between the spouses and, more radically, without any link to sexuality. This leads to manipulation & abuses gravely injurious to human dignity....

"If cloning were to be done for reproduction....The fact that someone would arrogate to himself the right to determine arbitrarily the genetic characteristics of another person represents a grave offense to the dignity of that person as well as to the fundamental equality of all people....

"From the ethical point of view, so-called therapeutic cloning is even more serious. To create embryos with the intention of destroying them, even with the intention of helping the sick, is completely incompatible with human dignity, because it makes the existence of a human being at the embryonic stage nothing more than a means to be used and destroyed. It is gravely immoral to sacrifice a human life for therapeutic ends."

I wanted to get some background on the events leading up to the passage of the embryonic stem cell legislation that Obama signed this year. This is of course an older book but it gave me the background I was looking for and fueled my interest in looking for more current information. It is basically the history for which I was looking.

This book shows a typical pros and cons of a science-for-general-audience type of book. Kolata, one of the most famous author in this field, offers numerous numbers of intriguing anecdotes in the peripheral realm of cloning. For instance, I found the Karl Ilmensee affair quite Intriguing , and a question like "what if a newspaper breaks the embargo policy of Nature (which happened)?" was answered to my satisfaction.

However, no story sheds much light on the central issue of biology. I would not be surprised if many general readers of this book would think that the purpose of the cloning of sheep was to generate some artificial protein in non-human live stock. Three technologies developed in 80's and 90's, namely recombinant protein expression, transgenic animal, and cloning are very confusing for non-scientists lay persons, but author never try to disentangle this confusions.

For me, I wish Kolata took a further step to provide some coherent hypothesis to explain the fundamental nature of this eureka event, as she has a good background in humanities. This type of the once-in-a-decade discovery has a nature to defy the conventional thought prevailing the era. Almost no developmental biologists thought the chromosome from somatic cells of adult mammal could gain totipotency by such a "primitive" method. Why can some scientist have the insight, while others can't? Is this a necessary byproduct of what Kuhn called paradigm? Or could this be at least an partial evidence of the relativism or instrumentalism advocated by WV Quine, or some other social contructivist? (or just a serendipitous application of "Don't worry Principle" that Sydney Brenner called?)

Neverthless, Kolata shows a great story-telling skills and I would recommend this book.

As a biochemistry major I was very excited about reading this book. I expected it to have in depth details on cloning and mention true clones such as identical twins. What a disappointment. The book went on and on for numerous pages about the ethical ramifications of cloning (yes, those exact same ethical ramifications TV and newspapers dealt with ad nauseam). Which yes, are important, but not enough to drone on about especially after readers have heard them all 10 times before. I actually found myself sighing and rolling my eyes over some of the ethical stances that were mentioned because they were so silly. I continued reading the book for a while in hopes that it would get better. It didn't. I finally threw the book under my bed (the black hole of bookdom) without ever finishing it.

The author of this book is mostly evenhanded; she clearly describes almost all the points of view about human cloning, no matter how profound or silly. However, she almost completely ignores the consensus viewpoint of most identical twins, triplets, and quads.

Identicals are a significant minority population, real human clones who view the entire cloning debate as silliness at best and bias against identicals at worst. Some societies used to kill identicals at birth, viewing them as evil!

No book about cloning is complete without serious consideration of living identicals.

Gary Noyes