Word: wilmut
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...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...
...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...
...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...
While the age of the donor is probably partly responsible, the research team--which included Ian Wilmut, Dolly's creator--may have discovered another factor. The more time a clone embryo spent in a test tube before transfer to a womb, the shorter the clone's telomeres. "In culture, cells go through 20 divisions," says research director Alan Colman. "That's a significant percentage of the 150 they go through in a lifetime...
...wait for the first human infant to be produced, in secret, by a Richard Seed or his offshore equivalent? Ian Wilmut, the soft-spoken scientist who started this noisy revolution, says no. The father of three (one of them adopted), he speaks passionately of honoring the individuality of the child. Human cloning, he says, should be banned...