Related articles and links |  1 of 2

This is the first entry in our newest weblog, Life Matters, a weekly roundup of news and commentary on issues of life: creating it, ending it, enhancing it, and treating it properly. We're pleased to announce that our blogger will be Nigel M. de S. Cameron, whose work in life ethics areas should be familiar to many readers of Christianity Today, where he has long served as a contributing editor.

Cameron is also research professor of bioethics and president of the Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future at Chicago-Kent College of Law in the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is director of the Council on Biotechnology Policy, senior fellow at the Wilberforce Forum and the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, and former provost of Trinity International University. He was the founding editor of Ethics & Medicine, and is author of The New Medicine: Life and Death After Hippocrates.

* * *

In 1997, the announcement that Dolly the sheep had been cloned was an earthquake. There's not much doubt that the history books will see it as the opening shot of the "biotech century"—and maybe the first big step down the road to the Brave New World. But we soon got used to her unsmiling face on our newsmagazines, and as scientists have been busy cloning mice and cattle and cats, we have become used to it.

So now the Koreans have cloned a dog. The first cloned dog is an Afghan hound, with the weird name Snuppy (something about Seoul National University, it seems). But at least we have been spared a repeat of the locker-room humor that gave us Dolly's name (for those who missed the "joke," Dolly is named for Dolly Parton, with special reference to the breast tissue of Dolly's archetype from which the skin cell was taken).

As The Washington Post notes, cloning a dog is very hard. Some species are much easier than others, and researchers have tried and failed in the past to get a canine equivalent of Copy Cat, the copied cat. One factor working in favor of the Korean efforts would seem to be the indefatigable energies of Dr. Hwang, the same Dr. Hwang who earlier this year led the world in cloning human embryos from which stem-cell lines could be culled. According to the Post report, more than 1,400 cloned embryos were created, of which just over 1,000 were deemed good enough to implant in a canine womb. Culling the eggs involved multiple operations on more than 100 dogs (dogs apparently have a strange reproductive system that is much harder to manage than those of most species—including our own). The scientists used 123 surrogate mothers. Two bitches carried puppies to term; one of which one died shortly after birth. Snuppy was the sole survivor.

What do we make this? First, it shows that energy, skill, and industrial-style execution will keep taking forward this technology. Those who said that humans "couldn't be" cloned all the way to term are simply going to be proved wrong. The cloning technology is unstoppable—unless, of course, we stop it. Second, it shows how the psychological barriers to human cloning will begin to erode. As I argued last week on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, Snuppy is a stepping stone to cloning our kids. Dogs are quasi family members; they are extraordinary animals that people have taken into their homes for thousands of years. That's why there will be such a push to use this technology, so that the very wealthy can clone their dogs—in a bizarre attempt to bring their beloved pooches back from the grave. Because a clone is basically an identical twin, of course, this is an illusion. But it is a powerful illusion, and if in 20 years or 50 years we are cloning kids, Snuppy will be seen as a vital stepping stone in overcoming our intuitive distaste for clonal babies.

next page... |  1 of 2

August (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49