Ian Wilmut, "Cloning People"

Although his is not yet a household name, Ian Wilmut has played a central role in developing cloning, the reproductive technology now dominating the headlines. Wilmut's success in this area has unleashed worldwide concern about the dangers and the promise of dramatically increasing the role scientists and genetic engineers play in the reproductive process. Should humans be cloned? Should research into the cloning process be allowed to continue? Although Wilmut makes clear his opposition to human cloning in the essay included here, he also acknowledges that he cannot control how the technology will be used.

Wilmut had his first success with reproductive technology in 1973, when he created Frostie, the first calf ever produced from a frozen embryo. In 1974, he joined the Animal Research Breeding Station in Scotland, which is now known as the Roslin Institute, and has conducted research there ever since. While working on a project involving the insertion of genes into sheep embryos in the mid-1980s, Wilmut began experimenting with the process of cloning and in 1990 he hired cell cycle biologist Keith Campbell to assist him in his research. Their work produced its first success with the 1995 birth of Megan and Morag, two Welsh mountain sheep cloned from differentiated embryo cells. On July 5, 1996, Wilmut and Campbell used a new technique of starving embryo cells before transferring their nuclei to fertilized egg cells to produce the first clone from adult cells, a Finn Dorset lamb named Dolly. In 1997, Wilmut and Campbell succeeded in creating Polly, a sheep cloned from fetal skin cells that had been genetically altered to contain a human gene. And by 2000, there was already news that groups of scientists were competing to be the first to successfully clone a human.

Wilmut's hope is that the cloning process will not be used to reproduce humans but to create two different kinds of animals: those that can manufacture donor organs for humans in need of transplants and those that can mimic human genetic defects for testing purposes. "Cloning Humans" introduces nonscientists to the moral and ethical issues involved in pursuing such research and offers an argument for allowing research of this kind to go forward.

"Cloning People," The Second Creation: Dolly and the Age of Biological Control, Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell, and Colin Tudge (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), 267-298.
Digital image from Ann On-line.
Biographical information from ThinkQuest and Ian Wilmut's essay, "Cloning for Medicine," Scientific American, December, 1998.

Links to Explore:

The Cloning of Dolly: an introduction to the process of cloning, written for the nonscientist.

The Roslin Institute: home page for the institute where Wilmut and Campbell have been pursuing their research on cloning. The institute is one of "the world's leading centres for research on farm and other animals. It has internationally recognized programs on molecular and quantitative genetics, genomics, early development, reproduction, animal behavior and welfare and has pioneered methods for the genetic modification and cloning of farm animals." Includes links the Institute's position on the ethics of cloning, as well as to associated sites that discuss cloning and nuclear transfer.

The United Network of Organ Sharing: home page for the organization responsible for a maintaining the nation's organ transplant waiting list. Includes links to the UNOS Transplant Patient DataSource, which includes data on organ-specific waiting lists, and a discussion of the bioethics of transplanting organs.

The Culture of Life Senate Testimony on Cloning: statement by the president of The Culture of Life Foundation to the U.S. Senate's subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space, arguing against human cloning and the cloning of human tissue for research purposes.

Questions for Learning:

• Dr. Jaime Love has written The Cloning of Dolly for the general reader. Has Dr. Love's description of the cloning process changed your feelings about whether or not such research should be pursued? What conclusions do you think Dr. Love wants his readers to come to about the cloning process?
  
  
• The official position of the Roslin Institute on the ethics of cloning is that "Roslin believes it has a clear social responsibility to keep the public informed of the results of its research and is a very active participant in the ongoing public debates about cloning, animal experimentation, genetic modification and human stem cell research." Would you say that Roslin's web site fulfills this responsibility? Does it succeed in keeping the public informed? How does the web site itself participate in "the ongoing debates" about cloning and biogenetic engineering?
  
  
• One of the possible uses of cloning, Wilmut tells us, is in the manufacturing of donor organs for humans. After you've visited The United Network of Organ Sharing and considered their discussion of the bioethics involved in transplanting human donor organs, do you think it makes sense to pursue the possibility of using cloning technology to get pigs to produce donor organs for humans? Given the lengthy waiting lists in nearly every organ category, does it necessarily follow that donor organs cloned from animals would alleviate human suffering?
  
  
• In his statement to the Senate subcommittee charged with regulating future uses of cloning, Robert Best argues against cloning humans and human tissue on the grounds that, "to clone successfully by somatic cell nuclear transfer is to create a new embryo. 'Therapeutic' cloning i.e., cloning of a human embryo for research and medical purposes, always results in the destruction, which is to say the death, of a human person." If Wilmut were to accept this line of reasoning, how would his research project have to change? Could research that involved transplanting human genetic material into animals go forward? If one accepts Best's argument, does it follow that research into cloning is fundamentally immoral?
  

Question for Connecting:

• In "Playing God in the Garden," Michael Pollan discusses recent efforts to alter the genetic makeup of plants. With Pollan's essay in mind, we might say that Wilmut is engaged in the next logical step in this process--that he and his fellow researchers are engaged, in effect, in "playing god in the barnyard." What dangers are posed by these projects and what possibilities are opened up? Should ethics be allowed to play a role in deciding whether work of this kind is allowed to go forward? At what point in the process do ethical considerations become significant for you: do you make a distinction between the biogenetic reengineering of plants and the biogenetic reengineering of animals?
  

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