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by Russ Kick
Excerpted from "You
Are Being Lied To"
It’s now routine to see news stories about various mammals being
cloned. Almost always, these reports mention that this “brings us
one step closer to cloning humans,” “human clones are right around
the corner,” and other clichés. What every last one of these
insightful stories fails to mention is this: Humans have already
been cloned.
I’m not talking about the “artificial twinning” experiments
performed in 1993 at the Washington University Medical Center.1
Although newspapers were quick to trumpet this as human cloning, it
was soon revealed that in reality this was a relatively primitive
procedure in which an already-fertilized egg was split into two
fertilized eggs. A nice party trick, but Mother Nature already does
it thousand of times a day when she creates twins, triplets, etc.
The real cloning took place two years later, in 1995, although it
wasn’t revealed until mid-November 1998.2
Unbelievably, only a few small newspaper stories weakly revealed one
of the most important biotechnology developments of all time. In
fact, it’s probably one of the most important developments in the
history of science and technology, period.
Working under the auspices of the private company
Advanced Cell
Technology and using the facilities of the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, scientists James Robl and Jose Cibelli
created a human clone. They took cells from Cibelli’s leg and cheek,
put them alongside a cow’s ovum with the genetic material stripped
out, and added a jolt of electricity.
One of Cibelli’s cells fused
with the cow’s ovum, which acted as though it had been fertilized,
and the cells began dividing. This is the same process used to
create Dolly, the famous cloned sheep from Scotland, only this was
done before Dolly was created.
A small story in the Boston Globe reported the following
about this achievement:
The experiments were privately
funded, and therefore aren’t bound by government regulations on
embryo research....
The researchers fused a human skin cell with a cow egg stripped
of its nucleus because that avoided using a scarce human egg to
nurture the genetic program of the new embryo, they said.3
So what happened to the clone?
The
scientists destroyed it when it reached the 32-cell stage. In other
words, the zygote had already gone through five divisions and was on
its way to becoming a human being. Scientists aren’t completely
certain what would’ve happened if the zygote had been allowed to
develop in a womb or in vitro, since such a thing has never been
attempted (as far as we know), but Dr. Patrick Dixon has an educated
guess:
If the clone had been allowed to
continue beyond implantation it would have developed as Dr.
Cibelli’s identical twin. Technically 1% of the human clone
genes would have belonged to the cow—the mitochondria genes.
Mitochondria are power generators in
the cytoplasm of the cell. They grow and divide inside cells and
are passed on from one generation to another. They are present
in sperm and eggs.
Judging by the successful growth of the combined human-cow clone
creation, it appears that cow mitochondria may well be
compatible with human embryonic development.4
Dixon is the author of ten books,
including The Genetic Revolution, which in 1993 predicted many of
the cutting-edge advances in biotech that have since come to pass.
He was also responsible for catapulting Dolly to international
stardom, convincing the first two newspapers that ran the story that
this was indeed a newsworthy development.
As for why the experiment was performed, CEO Michael West
said that it was strictly to harvest stem cells, not to create a
human being.
As the Boston Globe article explained:
The embryos would be allowed to
develop for only a few days, at which time they would be
stripped of their “embryonic stem cells” that would be grown in
laboratory dishes. These stem cells, the primordial cells in
every human embryo from which all of the hundreds of different
types of cells are descended, would be kept in their
undifferentiated state for as long as needed.
Then, presumably, they could be
directed to develop into one or more of a long list of tissues
and organs to treat human illnesses, among them diabetes, heart
failure and Alzheimer’s disease. However, the means to order
stem cells down particular developmental paths are in their
infancy.
Each patient’s own cells—scraped from a cheek or a piece of
skin—would be used to make the human-cow embryo. The resulting
donor tissues could then be transplanted back into the patient
without the body’s immune system rejecting them, because they
would be genetically identical.5
West explained why the zygote was
destroyed at the 32-cell stage:
“‘We wanted to take a timeout,’ said
Michael West, chief executive officer of Advanced Cell
Technology Inc., ‘and get input from ethicists and public
policy-makers’ before committing more time and money to the
project.” 6
One month after this startling
development, scientists in South Korea said that they, too, had
cloned a human:
Researchers at the infertility
clinic of Kyunghee University Hospital in Seoul said they had
grown an early human embryo using an unfertilized egg and a cell
donated by a woman in her 30s....
Lee Bo-yon, a researcher with the
hospital’s infertility clinic, told Reuters that the human embryo in
the Kyunghee University experiment divided into four cells before
the operation was aborted.
“If implanted into a uterine wall of
a carrier, we can assume that a human child would be formed and
that it would have the same gene characteristics as that of the
donor.” 7
Unlike the Advanced Cell Technology
experiment, all cells involved in the Kyunghee experiment were
human, and they all came from the same woman.
These stories would’ve probably created more of a stir if the
embryos had been allowed to mature into full-fledged babies. It
would make “great television” to show a gurgling baby while a
voiceover explains that it’s a clone. Still, the silence is
inexplicable. If the budding embryos hadn’t been destroyed at the
32-cell and 4-cell stages, they certainly had a good chance of
becoming humans.
Naturally, lots of embryos self-abort (i.e.
miscarriages), and cloned animals have a higher-than-average rate of
lethal mutations, so there are certainly no guarantees that the
babies would’ve made it to term.
Despite that, though, the cloning of a
human has already been accomplished. The ova were fertilized for all
intents and purposes, and they were going through the normal
divisions and growth that every one of us went through in the womb.
Yet these red-letter days in science have been forgotten. Articles
since then have utterly ignored these accomplishments.
For example,
on August 5, 2000, an article in the Washington Post noted:
“Since the 1997 birth of Dolly—the
first animal cloned from an adult cell—scientists around the
world have announced successful clonings of mice, cows and most
recently pigs.” 8
My heart skipped a beat when I saw this
Associated Press headline on August 13, 2000: “Research on Human
Cloning Hushed.”
I thought that perhaps the media had remembered
their own tiny reports in late 1998. No such luck. Amazingly, the
article talks only about the possibility that humans probably could
be cloned sometime in the indeterminate future, neglecting to
mention that it’s already happened.
Here are some representative
excerpts:
Dolly’s creators at Scotland’s
Roslin Institute boasted she embodied the promise of animals
that could produce drugs and organs for humans. But from the
moment her birth was announced February 23, 1997, many
interpreted her arrival as confirmation that cloning of humans
lurked around the corner—despite the institute’s careful attempt
to downplay that prospect.
“I’d be absolutely flabbergasted if we saw it in my lifetime,”
Grahame Bulfield, Roslin’s chief executive, reiterates more than
three years later. “It’s a nonsensical bit of hype.” Still,
scientists say some of their colleagues are undoubtedly working
on it, encouraged by further success with cloning animals such
as cows and pigs.
....
[Dr. Severino Antinori, the head of the International
Associated Research Institute in Rome] said many fertility
clinics are beginning to take more seriously the idea of cloning
babies.
....
Biologist Brigitte Boiselier, the Montreal-based scientific
director of Clonaid, a company set up the month after Dolly’s
birth was heralded with banner headlines worldwide, said her lab
is trying to perfect cloning in humans.
....
Eric Schon, a molecular biologist at New York’s Columbia
University, believes the creation of cloned babies could be two
to five years away.
“If it can be done, it will be
done,” he said. “The moment it could be done in sheep and mice
and cows, it was only a matter of time for human cloning.”
9
I suppose this reporter could’ve missed
the brief acknowledgements in the New York Times, the Boston Globe,
the Wall Street Journal, Knight Ridder, Reuters, the BBC, and Dr.
Dixon’s heavily-trafficked Website that discussed the fact that
humans have already been cloned, but how to explain the ignorance of
the people quoted in the article?
Several theories spring to mind.
Since the idea of cloning humans is so controversial, they don’t
want to admit that it’s already happened. Given the fact that
Advanced Cell Technology didn’t admit its research for three years,
this seems quite possible.
It also seems that some scientists don’t
feel that these accomplishments qualify as their definition of
cloning, apparently because the embryos weren’t allowed to mature.
They want to see a mewling infant; the fact that the ova were
dividing and in the process of creating a human being doesn’t count
for some reason. Do I sense professional jealousy?
Finally, owners of companies engaged in cloning obviously want to be
credited with being the first to clone a human, so they’re not going
to let the cat out of the bag. In the above AP article, notice that
Brigitte Boiselier of Clonaid “said her lab is trying to perfect
cloning in humans.”
That’s a very telling word. She’s not trying to
develop it, create it, devise it, pioneer it, or anything like
that—she’s trying to “perfect” it, which leads me to believe that
she knows it’s already been done, and Clonaid may have done it
themselves.
Given the secrecy in this area—not only
did
Advanced Cell Technology keep the lid on for three years, but
even the announcement of Dolly was delayed until she was eight
months old—you have to wonder what other human cloning news has been
kept from us.
After all, the Americans created their clone in 1995,
and the Koreans in 1998. What’s happened in the years since then?
For all we know, there might be babies and toddlers out there who
are clones.
But that is speculative, while the achievements of the American and
Korean scientists are not.
The next time some news report
breathlessly announces that human clones could possibly be created
sometime soon, just remember that you’re being lied to. They already
have been.
Endnotes
1. Anonymous. (1993). “Embryo
experiment succeeds.” New York Times, Oct 24.
2. Saltus, Richard. (1998).
“News of human-cow cell raises
ruckus.” Boston Globe, November 14; McFarling, Usha Lee.
(1998).
“Bioethicists warn that human
cloning will be difficult to stop,” Knight Ridder, November
18;
anonymous. (1999).
“First cloned
human embryo revealed,” BBC News, June 17.
3. Op cit., Saltus.
4. Dixon, Patrick, Dr. “Human
cloning from cow eggs and human cells.”
Global Change Website.
5 . Op cit., Saltus.
6 . Ibid.
7 . Dixon, Patrick, Dr. “Human
cloning: First embryo made in Korea or Britain?” From original
article by Reuters.
Global Change Website.
See also anonymous (1998).
“Human cloning?: Cloning
research in South Korea.” MacLean’s, Dec 28, p 110;
anonymous. (1999).
“Human cloning research proceeds
in South Korea.” The Christian Century, Jan 20, p 48;
Schuman, Michael, et al. (1998).
“Korean experiment fuels cloning
debate; more work is needed to prove a live birth is
possible.” Wall Street Journal, Dec 21, p B7; WuDunn,
Sheryl. (1998).
“Koreans clone human cell.” New
York Times, Dec 20.
8 . Chea, Terence. (2000). “Going
whole hog for cloning.” Washington Post , Aug 5.
9 . Anonymous. (2000). “Research on human cloning hushed.”
Associated Press, Aug 13.
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