Human cloning bad for babies, parents, future

Forget Dolly the lamb. Let’s raise the stakes. Let’s
enter a new era of human cloning.

In our warped, hypothetical new world, Danny and Sallie are
among three fortunate couples. Over the last nine painful months,
95 women have miscarried or aborted their cloned fetuses. Two other
woman have died due to complications. But Danny and Sallie are the
proud new parents of Jesse ““ a carbon copy of his father,
save for the enlarged head, deformed limbs, and squashed face.

Reality check. Who in their right mind would clone a human
being? That’s pure science-fiction, right?

Wrong. Severino Antinori; who became famous by artificially
impregnating a post-menopausal, 62-year-old woman in 1994; recently
announced that an unidentified woman is currently pregnant with a
cloned embryo and will give birth mid-January. According to
Antinori the pregnancy is “going well; there are no
problems.”Â 

Following Antinori’s speech at a press conference in Rome,
hundreds of couples volunteered to attempt clone-births. Already,
masses of individuals are senselessly committing themselves to an
illusion created by Antinori. The success rate of cloning is around
97 percent, and even then, who’s to say that a
“successful” human clone will not develop fatal
deformities? 

In the words of Rudolf Jaenisch, a cloning specialist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, cloning humans is
“irresponsible and repugnant and ignores the overwhelming
scientific evidence from seven mammalian species cloned so
far.”

The scientific community is up in arms. It’s
well-known among many researchers that clones are either deformed,
die early, or are miscarried. When Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell
Technology implanted 500 cloned embryos into 250 cows, only 24
healthy cows survived to infancy. Eighty cows miscarried, and
even more never became pregnant.

In the journal Theriogenology a similar study performed on
calves reveals a 5 to 10 percent cloning success rate. Many cloned
calves were born with both non-lethal and lethal abnormalities;
including enlarged organs, caved-in faces, flawed kidneys,
intestinal blockages, immune deficiencies, and diabetes.

Other researchers emphasize the fact that ostensibly
“normal” clones are biological time-bombs ““ fine
one day and dead the next.

“It is very probable that, at least for some populations
of clones, some unpredictable defects will appear in the long
run,” reported Atsuo Ogura of the National Institute of
Infectious Diseases in Tokyo. Ogura and his team’s work
with cloned mice reveals a shocking discovery: many cloned mice can
and will die of diseases including cancer and liver disease as much
as 800 days (a substantial portion of a mouse’s life span)
after birth.

Thus, even if a woman is able to beat the odds and give birth to
a cloned baby, defects and deformities may lurk in her
child’s future. Is it really fair to subject a child to
the emotional and physical pain of being a clone ““ to
knowingly create an outcast?

There is no reason to play with fire. Adoption is an
alternative, and one that saves lives rather than taking
them. Although it’s nice to have a child that looks like
daddy or mommy, would you really want your kid to look that much
like you ““ an exact clone of yourself? Also, the child
wouldn’t be a unique mixture of both parents’ genes,
but rather a copy-cat of either the mother or father. Genetically
speaking, the child would only be the offspring of one parent.

Nonetheless, some individuals seem to harbor an animal instinct
to transmit their genes from one generation to the next.
Unfortunately, it is this same instinct that doctors like Antinori
will use as a springboard from which to launch their own lucrative
careers.

As a result of Antinori and his eager clientele, New
Year’s may deliver a whole lot more than 2003. The cries of
fireworks and party horns may mingle with another sort of cry
““ the birth wails of the world’s first cloned human
child.

With this baby, a new and frightening epoch in fertility science
will begin. Mothers will give birth to deformed children or die in
the process. A profound, scientific carelessness will be
perpetuated, because infertile parents are obsessed with having
children imbued with their own genes ““ genes concealing the
untold horrors that await in the future.

Jansen’s column runs every other Monday.