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"The potential of gene technology is beyond the comprehension of most people today" - Dr Patrick Dixon - Wall Street Journal (E)

RealVideo - "Should scientists be told when to stop - human cloning etc. (28kbps - 300kbps)

RealVideo - "Human cloning - how it will be done" (28kbps)

Flash Video - "Human cloning - amazing flash graphics - fun on human cloning

Free human cloning book for students - Entire text of "The Genetic Revolution" by Dr Patrick Dixon

Human cloning - part one - who is doing human cloning - video

Human cloning - part two - why investors don't like cloning - video

Human cloning debate - over 50,000 messages read

Human cloning means designer people with known pedigree. This is the ultimate pedigree child.  Cloning of human embryos has already been achieved - see below. Successful cloning of adults has been announced but not yet proven.  It is only a matter of time, months or a very few years before human cloning is a reality for anyone with enough cash, willing to take the risks of a hideously malformed or emotionally damaged child.  

Human cloning of a baby could have happened more than once last year - how would you know?  Human cloning headlines are usually at least two years behind what's really going on - see below.  What you really need to be asking is what scientists will be saying in press conferences in 2003 about their human cloning research, talking about work that they actually did in 2001.  

What follows was written in 1999 and updated 2000 and is really important background on human cloning research - but for latest cloning news press here.

At the current pace of progress, I predict we will hear one day that human clones had been successfully implanted into surrogate mothers as early as 2000/1, although with terrible results, tragic mutations and abnormalities in almost all cases.  This stuff is hard to talk about.  That's why it's very unlikely that you will know until some time after the event.

One thing is beyond any doubt: despite huge risks, and widespread public condemnation, by January 2001 many different scientists across the world were already locked in a race to clone the first human, as a baby for TV cameras. 

Huge amounts of money are at stake in human cloning research.  Teams have announced their aim, many people have come forward with offers of eggs, their own adult cells and money - and the US still has no laws to prevent human cloning from happening, nor do most other countries of the world.

I write this after a deluge of media calls and interviews on human cloning possibilities: Reuters, Press Association, front page Times and Sunday Telegraph, CNN, SKY, ITN, BBC, Greek TV, Japanese TV, Norwegian TV, German TV, GMTV, LBC, IRN, Fox TV, CBS, RTE, ABC - the list on human cloning goes on and then there is the e-mail... from people who want human cloning for themselves or to "recover" a dead child.  If you want to look at some recent media stories on human cloning I've contributed to press here.

The headlines above first came nearer reality on 23 Feb1997 when world media reported the existence of Dolly the sheep: cloned from an adult. I had predicted the Dolly headline in 1993, in my book The Genetic Revolution. A few days later the Edinburgh scientists admitted that frozen cells had been used to make Dolly, having seemed to deny it when the story first broke. That meant that animals (and in theory people) could be cloned after death. US scientists also revealed that they had cloned monkeys (using cells from an embryo). The British scientist responsible for Dolly admitted to a Parliamentary committee (6 March 1997) that human cloning could be possible in two to three years (after vigorous denials by many embryologists). I had been saying the same from the moment the story broke.

President Clinton launched an immediate 90 day report into the implications for human cloning as soon as the news of Dolly became public. Norway did the same while the EC urgently considered a response. The news on human cloning experiments exposed the fact that most nations of the world had little or no legislation covering genetic engineering. This has to change.

Richard Seed said over two years ago that he was "a few weeks" from his human cloning experiments. He has attracted money and people.  I've met him, debated with him on TV (RealVideo on human cloning).  He has been followed by Clonaid, a new human cloning organisation with cash and 300 couples ready to start.  Dr Seed declared that he cannot be stopped from human cloning under current US law, and if human cloning laws are changed he will move the work to Mexico.  He has  announced a human cloning lab for Japan - purchase of land and $15 million backing. Every week there is another mammal cloning headline. Dolly the sheep gave birth to a healthy lamb, Bonny.  In July 1998 came rumours of a cloned mouse, Mickey, created by Dr Ryuzo Yanagimachi, University of Hawaii.  In November 1998 we heard that Japanese scientists had already cloned cows from milk - cells in the milk. If you want to see the staggering pace of human cloning announcements - check out our human cloning news summary.

As I say, remember that what you hear today is not what is going on now, its already old history.   And scientists in the field are determined to keep it that way.  Hence you only knew about Dolly's creation when she was already 7 months old - more on this below.   Another example of secrecy was the extraordinary announcement by Advanced Cell Technology, Massachusetts on 12 November 1998 that three years previously they managed to take the nucleus from a human cell from Dr Jose Cibelli and insert it into a cows egg.   The human genes activated and the egg began to divide.  They destroyed it at the 32 cell stage, well on the way to becoming a Dr Cibelli's clone.  This research was more spectacular than Dolly, yet carried out years earlier with a total news blackout.  More recently in March 2001 Australian scientists said they had been carrying on similar secret human cloning experiments using human cells and pig eggs for over two years.  What I want to know is this: what are they doing today that they won't be talking about till 2002 or 2003 or perhaps 2004?

People tend to think of Parliamentary campaigns when they want to change cloning laws. This is a sad mistake and explains why so many campaigns have failed: the biggest battles are not won in Parliament but in the living rooms of the nation.

It has been good to see truth about cloning begin to prevail, after deliberate under-playing of the news by so-called "experts" in a desperate damage limitation exercise to prevent destruction of their research grants by public demand. They are scared of public reaction. They think the public has no real understanding and so these matters should be kept from the public eye, discussed only by scientists and ethical committees. But these committees are dominated by the industry.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE CLONED OR TO CLONE SOMEONE? IF SO PLEASE E_MAIL ME USING HOME PAGE. TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF. WHY YOU WANT TO. WHAT YOUR FEELINGS ARE. WHETHER YOU WOULD BE WILLING TO TELL YOUR STORY PUBLICLY. ALL CORRESPONDENCE WILL BE TREATED CONFIDENTIALLY SO YOU WILL NOT BE IDENTIFIED WITHOUT YOUR EXPRESS CONSENT. However please do not expect a reply. I am swamped with messages. Be assured that all identifiers will be removed.

The flood of e-mail has revealed some misunderstanding about my own views. Let me make it absolutely clear that I am opposed to human cloning on ethical grounds. It is open to gross abuse. It undermines the uniqueness of the individual and raises profound religious and ethical questions. 

Three reasons not to clone: (Press here for more)

1.    Health risks from mutation of genes - an abnomal baby would be a nightmare come true.  Huge risks of mutations - of a monster.  Just look at what has happened in animal experiments.  You can't always spot the mutations or developmental abnormalities by gene testing, nor by ultrasound scans, until after birth.

2.    Emotional risks - child grows up knowing her mother is her sister, her grandmother is her mother.  Every time her mother looks at her she is seeing herself growing up.  Unbearable emotional pressures on a teenager trying to establish his or her identity. What happens to a marriage when the "father" sees his wife's clone grow up into the exact replica (by appearance) of the beautiful 18 year old he fell in love with 35 years ago?  A sexual relationship would of course be with his wife's twin, no incest involved technically.

3.    Risk of abuse of the technology - see below.

	Recover someone who was loved - a twin, a reminder.
	Infertility - rather than use donated sperm and eggs, why not use a cell of your own to give birth to "yourself", your own twin ?
	Eugenics - an attempt to improve the human race.
	Megalomania - a desire to reproduce one's own qualities.
	Spare parts - using a cell from your own body to duplicate yourself. Take tissue e.g. bone marrow, then offer baby for adoption.
	Assisting medical research
	Just curiosity

Human cloning debate - over 50,000 messages read

Human cloning has always caught the public imagination. We now have the technology to take a few cells from a modern day Einstein, or a musical genius or a child prodigy and to create hundreds of cloned babies which have exactly the same genes. Of course, as identical twins, clones will have individual differences, separate identities - separate souls. However studies of twins raised apart show remarkable similarities. There is more in our genes than we often realise.

Just think how attractive that could be to some dictator who fancies the idea of watching himself growing up, or dreams of populating the world with a new race of genetically superior people.

For years many scientists have been telling us that human cloning was impossible, and would never be possible. How wrong they all were. It is absurd for geneticists and embryologists to mock and stifle debate by dismissing vital issues as "science fiction". As we have seen recently, yesterday's science fiction is today's reality when it comes to genes. We can hardly keep pace with the lightning advances being made.

....will we ever ?

In 1993 the Mail on Sunday featured my meeting in the 1980s with a leading British scientist who claimed he had cloned human embryos by artificial twinning. He had separated cells shortly after fertilisation in a process mimicked by nature some 4,000 times a day somewhere in the world. Each cell had the potential to become a new embryo.  Over 15 years later this scientist has yet to go public about his early experiments.

The reaction from leading embryologists in 1993 was swift and damning. They said that it was impossible in humans, and anyway, who would wants to do it? This was despite the fact that artificial twinning was already a standard breeding technique in other mammals, and that natural human twins have been around since the beginning of human existence. Indeed, 4,000 identical twins are born every day somewhere in the world. It is a proven technology. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence could see that artificial acceleration of the natural twinning process should not only be possible, but also able in theory to produce healthy children. Thus the protestations were particularly silly, but swallowed by the media with hardly a question.

Yet just five months later Jerry Hall of Washington University announced that he too had managed to artificially twin identical human embryos in a process that has always been perfectly legal in Britain, although requiring a licence. The embryos he used were defective and were destroyed shortly after the experiments. Nevertheless, his work caused public outcry.

Journalists often miss the real story

The event was reported in scientific language as part of a research paper in a journal but the significance was completely missed. The trouble is that genetics is complicated and understood by only a few journalists in any depth. Perhaps that is why the BBC decided when the news broke about Dolly the sheep that the story should not be covered at all because it was not news. This bizarre line was held for half a day after I first telephoned Press Association and the Sunday Telegraph to tell them that another paper was about to run the story on the front page. The Sunday Telegraph responded at 9pm Saturday night by stopping the paper and redoing their own front page. Press Association ran two pages on it, sent all over the world. Within an hour television companies globally were beginning to wake up. Within 48 hours President Clinton was issuing emergency measures having been shocked by what was possible under US law.

Spare Parts

One reason people have given for doing this kind of research is to make spare parts in the future. Once an embryo has been twinned, one embryo can be implanted and allowed to develop into a baby, while the other is frozen.

If the child later develops an illness such as leukaemia, then the frozen twin could be thawed and implanted into a surrogate mother, to be culled for spare parts after a few months' gestation. You and I may react against such ideas, but when sick or dying children are involved, pressures can be enormous to do all that is scientifically possible. Parents are very persuasive. Who can stare a beautiful child in the face and try to explain about ethics in the face of possible death, about statistical chances and moral dangers ? These things are extremely difficult and genetics is making choices more complex still.

A number of steps have already been taken. For example, tissue from aborted foetuses is already used to treat adults. Time-warp twins have already been born - non-identical twins conceived in the laboratory on the same day, but implanted 18 months apart. And it is not unknown for a mother to agree to have another child for the express purpose of providing much needed transplant material for the older child. Spare part production from clones would extend these principles.

For some time I have speculated that we would be able to go further: instead of merely producing artificial twins identical to each other but not to their parents, we would one day be able to produce several hundred identical children, just using human eggs and cells from an adult (nuclear transfer).

This too was dismissed out of hand as alarmist and fanciful by leading authorities, despite the fact that such experiments had already been carried out successfully in frogs as long ago as 1952. Frogs are easier than mammals to manipulate which is probably why we heard in 1997 of headless frogs rather than headless sheep. The truth is that when it comes to cloning of mammals there has been a deliberate conspiracy of silence. At the very moment of such protestations, advanced experiments of varying kinds were already taking place in utmost secrecy.

Make no mistake: gene technology has the power to cure, feed, alter and destroy us, and many scientists are scared of a massive public reaction which could stop their work - if you find out what they are up to.

There is a reluctance to tell the full story until afterwards. 

When it came to cloning Dolly the sheep, why was there no press statement a year before about what they were hoping to do? Dr Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh told me during a World Service interview that one reason for delay was to file a patent. Gene technology is big business, and cloning is worth millions. The cloning announcement was initially valued by the city at $60 million - the amount by which the PPL shares rose on the days following the announcement.

At the time I said the next step (soon) would be cloning of adult mammals. Once again there was a chorus of indignant reaction from the cloning industry with the usual comments "No one would want to" or "It can't be done". They are wrong. The fact is that at the very moment that these comments were being made, the Roslin Institute was already well advanced in such adult cloning techniques. Hence a year or so later we heard not only that they had succeeded, but that the lambs were already six months old. The time to debate these matters is not a year or more after an experiment, but before the process begins.

Secrecy continues. The other day after a media related discussion on cloning humans a leading British embryologist confessed to me privately that he was carrying out experiments himself on animals relating to human medical research that would raise serious ethical questions in the public mind if the experiments became known. He made it very clear that he had no intention of letting the public know because a reaction would endanger his work. He claimed it was not really in secret because he had talked to an ethical committee about it.

As I said to him, what disturbs me is that people like him appear to say one thing in public, on the media, and another the moment the cameras are turned off. There is an inconsistency which undermines trust and destroys credibility. Certainly when it comes to cloning as we have seen the track record of honesty is not good among so-called "experts".

The headlines continue almost every day. For example on British newspapers reported recently that DNA from 8,000 year old human remains found in a cave had been linked to Adrian Targett who is alive today, and a direct descendent. They proved this by identifying a gene transmitted only down the female line, using tooth and bone DNA from the body, first discovered in 1903 during drainage work. The next question is whether such DNA fragments could be used to alter the genes of a human or animal cell? The answer is that they almost certainly could. The alternative would be to use the sequencing information to build another identical strip of genetic code for addition to living cells.

We are also seeing ever more bizarre methods of reproduction. On it has been announced that a pair of embryonic children are growing up inside the same womb, with five parents between them. Angela is a surrogate mother who is pregnant with the foetuses of two different couples. This has resulted from research by the same doctor who was responsible for the birth of a child two year's after its mother's death in 1995. Angela is 35 years old, living in Rome. She has not been paid a fee.

Since we now have the ability to alter life on earth, we had better think hard about the kind of world we want. It is no good simply reacting to today's headlines with dismay and revulsion. We must push ahead of the news to debate the future. We do not have much time.

We must also resist the temptation to a black and white approach. Many of the issues are complex, and gene technology has tremendous power for good if properly used.

The question is where we draw the line?  In the last 24 months more than a million new animals with mutant genes were born in British laboratories alone. Each is a "transgenic" mix of genes from two or more different animals eg mouse and rabbit or monkey and rat. Genes from humans are already working in microbes, fish, rabbits, mice, pigs, sheep and cows. Some of these humanised pigs may be providers of heart transplants in the future.

But how many genes does an animal have to have to gain human rights? The pigs have a tiny amount of human genes, but a richer mix could be made. Geep have already been born - half sheep and half goat. What about combining humans and monkeys to make a half and half breed? This is not difficult. All you have to do is combine two balls of growing cells in the pre-embryo stage.  Human and rabbit cells have already been combined to make a humabbit - announced late in 2000.  Fortunately only a few human embryo cells were added to the rabbit embryo - which was born looking exactly like a normal rabbit but with a mixture of human cells throughout its brain, skin, bone, kidneys, liver, eyes and heart.

Will humonkeys be recognised as morally responsible individuals before the law if they are able to talk? Monkeys and humans share most of their genes in common anyway. Will theologians decide that humonkeys are able to receive salvation like the rest of us?

Astonishing progress is also being made in the genetically altered food industry. For example, scorpion poison genes have been added to cabbages to kill caterpillars (but what about people?). Modified maize is now found in a wide variety of foods (without labelling). The seed has been deliberately mixed on collection from farms in the US so that it is impossible for food manufacturers to tell which sacks have modified grain and which are natural. We can also build germ warfare viruses far more lethal than that causing AIDS. Germ warfare agents are held at Porton Down, controlled by the Ministry of Defence, where they are used to test biotech suits amongst other things. I have a letter written by the director confirming this, drafted in response to a question in Parliament.  See my new thriller on biotech germ warfare published Feb 2001.

We cannot go on like this, lurching from one sensational headline to another. We urgently need a comprehensive Gene Charter with global agreement on how this technology should be used. Too many decisions about this technology are controlled by specialist committees dominated by scientists involved in or sympathetic to the work.

There is a huge ethical vacuum. We do not need bombastic moralistic statements, but rather a common-sense view, based on principles which the whole community can support and understand. Two foundation stones should be respect for the uniqueness and mystery of human life, and care for future of the planet. So far decisions made have been pragmatic rather than based on higher values. The church has a vital role to play.

The reason why TV camera crews and journalists arrive at my door from all over the world is because of this crisis of ethics. Moral chaos. Now we know what can be done the question is what should we do? Are these doors that should be opened? A Nobel prize winner who helped develop nuclear science has said he fears a new generation of smart viruses could wipe us all out. But this is just another aspect of the same thing.

The lesson of history is that whatever is possible will be tried somewhere by someone at some time but this is no excuse for sitting back. Whilst it is true that laws cannot prevent catastrophe or crime, they do help define the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and make deviation less common.

A new ethical committee to consider human cloning has been set up in Britain. the trouble is that like the HFEA it is dominated by those who have little regard for the sanctity of human life, and by those from the industry. It is also answerable to the Department of Trade which says more than anything. I cannot think of anything less appropriate. It should answer to the Department of Health or Environment.

Politicians are populists. They tend to go with the flow of public opinion on things like human cloning which in turn is often swung by media debate. That is why it so vitally important that people from every walk of life take every opportunity to contribute to the human cloning media debate.

The choice is ours. We cannot ignore gene technology, nor should we condemn all of it, although there should be a complete ban on human cloning. The key is proper regulation - not just in the UK but world-wide. We need an urgent UN-sponsored global summit on biotechnology followed by international agreement. Either we control gene technology today, or gene technology will redesign us by tomorrow.

Dr Patrick Dixon is author of Futurewise and is heavily involved in media debates on genetics. Watch Dr Dixon at work - live Webcam transmissions.  Should scientists be told when to stop?  Web TV.

Human cloning debate - over 50,000 messages read

Human cloning - brilliant RealVideo on how it will be done

Other mega-cloning resources (strongly recommended):

Brave New World!   Latest cloning news  Cloning Links 

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