Copyright 2002 The Chronicle Publishing Co.  

The San Francisco Chronicle
DECEMBER 29, 2002, SUNDAY, FINAL EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 1135 words

HEADLINE: Experts fear the worst for clones of humans;

Children face risk of being 'perpetually ill'

SOURCE: Chronicle Science Writer

BYLINE: Carl T. Hall

BODY:
Ethical questions about the wisdom of human cloning were the last thing on Lou Hawthorne's mind Saturday.

As chief executive officer of a Marin company that is attempting to clone pets for profit, Hawthorne well knows what can go wrong in cloning experiments. He feared the worst for the now famous "Eve" -- purportedly the first human laboratory clone.

"It's reckless," he said, noting the combined morbidity and mortality rate in cloned animals runs about 20 to 30 percent in those carried to term, excluding miscarriages. "Any parent should be very, very concerned. The risk here is creating a perpetually ill child. Is there any worse nightmare than that?"

The post-Christmas announcement of Eve's birth by a bishop of the alien-worshiping Raelian cult and head of its affiliated "Clonaid" company has riveted world attention. To some, it's a classic science-fiction scenario that suddenly seems all too real.

Hawthorne, whose company, "Genetic Savings & Clone," offers to bank your pet's DNA for an initial $895 plus $100 a year, found himself playing the voice of reason amid the hoopla.

He urged people to set aside the confusing bioethical debates about cloning and focus on the more banal -- but truly chilling -- question of an individual baby's health.

"It's time to stop worrying about cloning so much, and wasting time and bandwidth on this question of playing God, and focus on the welfare of the child," Hawthorne said.

VARIETY OF DEFECTS

All variety of birth defects have cropped up in cloned mammals -- diabetes, abnormal hearts and livers, premature aging, metabolic disorders, seizures that can make a calf drop to the ground.

Even Dolly, the celebrated cloned sheep, has shown signs of premature aging, although some believe her arthritis may be partly due to the strain of standing on her hind legs too much, begging for food and attention -- possibly a side effect of the sheep's status as media darling.

Spontaneous miscarriages are common in attempts to clone nonhuman animals at mainstream laboratories. At the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center in Beaverton, Ore., for example, research biologist Gerald Schatten (now head of a developmental-biology center at the University of Pittsburgh) made 724 attempts to clone a nonhuman primate -- and failed each time.

Schatten was shocked by the news about Eve flashing across his hotel television screen in Aruba, where he was vacationing with his family.

Word of the Raelians' cloning experiments came not in a scientific journal but in a press conference at a Holiday Inn in south Florida, located coincidentally only about 25 miles from the headquarters of the National Enquirer.

"The aspect that amazes me is this is not relegated to the middle of the tabloids where it belongs," Schatten said.

UNLIKELY 'PROOF' WILL HOLD UP

Clonaid claims it will produce proof in about a week. There is nothing as yet to suggest any such proof exists, and Schatten said he expects it will all be revealed as farce.

"We know that primate cloning is fundamentally different than cloning sheep or mice," he said.

Full details of his own cloning attempts have been withheld pending publication by a scientific journal. But Schatten said the take-home message of the research makes the Eve announcement all the more chilling: "Cloning Old World primates is encountering unanticipated biological obstacles," he said.

Would-be cloners of dogs and cats use arrays of DNA on microchips to test the health of early-stage embryos, decreasing the odds of an abnormal fetus developing from a cloning procedure.

There is no evidence this was done by the Raelian-linked Clonaid company, which claims to have done the Eve cloning at an undisclosed location outside the United States. Part of the reason for the secretiveness is a federal investigation into the possibility that laws may have been broken if the child or mother was endangered. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it is investigating.

CLEAR PROOF UNLIKELY

Many scientists said it was unlikely any clear proof will emerge that the baby girl was really produced by the process known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which DNA from a skin cell of the child's 31-year-old American mother allegedly was transplanted into one of the woman's eggs, then implanted in her womb.

In effect, this would make Eve her mother's identical twin -- born a generation later. Unlikely as that may seem, many cloning experts noted that humans may not be the most difficult species to clone -- assuming experimenters are willing to gamble with the child's health.

Techniques may eventually be shown safe and effective. The problem is, right now no one knows.

"We need to put things back into a scientific arena," said Dr. Sandra Carson, a reproductive endocrinologist in Houston and president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, a mainstream fertility medical society.

ONLY THE GENES ARE THE SAME

Fuzzy sci-fi notions of cloning suggest to many people something truly spooky, akin to identity theft or perhaps a way to defy death. Surprisingly high percentages of people suspect that a clone is created fully formed as an adult carbon copy of whoever provided the DNA.

In fact, only the genes are the same -- the person is someone different. But no cloning trick can bring an individual everlasting life.

"If someone were to clone me, you wouldn't get a 52-year-old balding guy in a red sweater sitting here," said Michael Conn, associate director of the Oregon primate center. "It's a baby. People claim this is the key to immortality. But what you're really talking about is a genetic replica. The clone wouldn't have your knowledge, your life experiences, and if you had a bike accident at age 4, and got a scar, the clone wouldn't have that scar. So it's not you -- it's a different person."

HUMAN RIGHT CONCERNS

The human and health rights of cloned persons -- as well as the rights of the women who provide the eggs and bear any cloned embryos -- are of paramount concern to Marcy Darnovsky, associate executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, an Oakland-based nonprofit. the center advocates a moratorium on all cloning -- and a complete ban on the type of reproductive experiments said to be sponsored by the Raelians and others -- until effective regulations can be enacted.

"We are just in the infancy of human genetic science," Darnovsky said. "There's no way to do this in any way considered safe.

"Research cloning needs to be effectively regulated," she added, "and there needs to be a lot of discussion about this. These technologies really do have the capacity to alter the human species. So that's a pretty serious move to be making."E-mail Carl T. Hall at chall@sfchronicle.com.

LOAD-DATE: December 29, 2002