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On Human Cloning

Lee Silver
Dr. Lee Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton University, is author
of Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will
Transform the American Family (Avon, 1998). In this interview, Silver
argues why we should not only not fear human cloning but should
embrace it for the many benefits it will bring.

NOVA: Why is the idea of human cloning so frightening?

Silver: In 1997 when Dolly was announced to the world, the word
clone already existed in almost every language in the world, and to
people it meant xeroxing, making a copy of something or somebody.
There was a very popular movie called Multiplicity, in which a man had
too much to do in his life, so he stamped out extra copies of himself.
So when people heard the word cloning, they thought that it was now
possible to replicate a human being, including maybe the human soul.
People were frightened to death that scientists somehow had gained
control over human life.
Most people who answered a survey in which 95 percent of them said
they were against human cloning didn't understand what cloning was to
scientists. The word means something very different to scientists than
it does to the lay public. To a scientist, the only thing that a clone is is
an organism that has the same genetic information as another
organism. So people eat clones all the time. We eat bananas.
Bananas are produced by cloning, seedless grapes must be
produced by cloning, and there are millions of human clones walking
the face of the Earth right now. We call them identical twins. They are
clones. They have the same genetic information, and yet we know they
are different people, and they have no problem with their individuality.

NOVA: So what can cloning

really do?

Silver: The only thing that

"There are millions of

human clones walking the
face of the Earth right
now. We call them
identical twins."

human cloning could ever do

reproductively is allow the birth
of a child who would be
genetically equivalent only in
genes to somebody else who
already existed. It would be like
a later-born identical twin, except the social relationship would be
different, because the child would probably be born to a person who
would want to treat it as a child, rather than as a twin.

So instead of having your genetic material come from two people, you
have your genetic material come from one person. But nobody is
going to know that child is a clone, unless the mother tells someone,
because all babies look just like babies, and even as the child is
growing up, you'll never know the child is a clone. Because it just might
look like the mother by chance, and it might behave like the father by
chance. So there's no way you'll ever know a child is a human clone,
rather than just a kid who happens to be like the parent by chance.

NOVA: I was going to ask you what a cloned child would be like.
Silver: Genetic information provides a framework for human life. It

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provides us with our potential to grow to a certain height, our

predisposition to certain diseases, and even predispositions to
certain behaviors. But the environment acts upon and modifies the
genetic endowment, and there's a third component, our own
consciousness, which allows us to go against both our genes and our
environment.
So a child born by cloning, what I
call a mono-parental child,
"There's no other reason would
would have some similarities to
the parent, but it would be his or
to use cloning
her own person. A lot of people
technology, except to
say it's horrible that egomaniac
allow infertile people to men are going to want to cheat
mortality by cloning themselves. I
have babies. It doesn't
say to them, "Well do you know
serve any other purpose." what an egomaniac man is
going to get from this process?
First, he's going to have to find a
surrogate mother to gestate the embryo and fetus. Then this child is
going to be born. It's going to be a little boy, who grows up into a big
boy, who doesn't listen to his father."
That's because every child is ultimately unpredictable and
uncontrollable. So who wants an unpredictable, uncontrollable child?
Well, every adult who has ever decided to have children does it,
knowing they're going to have an unpredictable, uncontrollable child.
There's no other reason to use cloning technology, except to allow
infertile people to have babies. It doesn't serve any other purpose.

NOVA: What I keep hearing everybody say is the only thing holding
everyone back are the safety issues.

Silver: That's correct.

NOVA: So what are some of those?
Silver: It's perfectly clear that if
cloning works in every other
mammal in which it's been tried, "It's perfectly clear that if
it will work in human beings. But cloning works in every
at the moment, there is a pretty
high frequency of birth defects in other mammal in which
these other animals. There are a it's been tried, it will work
large number of cloned calves
in human beings."
that are born too big and have
health problems. As long as that
frequency of birth defects is high, and we can't control it, then it would
be unethical to use this technology to try to bring about the birth of a
child.
But there's a way around this problem. If we understand what the
cause of the birth defect is, you should be able to select embryos at
the outset that are not going to have the birth defect and start the
process with an embryo that you know is going to avoid this birth
defect. Once that happens, the safety issues will probably go away.

NOVA: Another doctor said to me, "Look, it took them so many tries.
It's such an inefficient process."

Silver: Well, there was a reproductive technology in which the doctors

who developed this technology went through the first 103 women
without a single success, and, finally, on the 104th time, they got a
success. That technology was in vitro fertilization, and it took Patrick
Steptoe and Robert Edwards [who, in 1978, brought about the birth of
Louise Brown, the first baby conceived outside her mother's womb]
104 times to get one baby, that's a success rate of less than one
percent.
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Ian Wilmut [who orchestrated the birth of Dolly] put cloned embryos into
13 surrogate mothers, and one got pregnant and had offspring. So the
success rate of cloning was much greater in the very first experiment
than the original success rate of IVF, and the success rate of cloning
has become much, much, much better as the technology has become
optimized, just like the IVF success rate has become better with
optimization of the technology.

NOVA: At first wasn't there a

"The success rate of

cloning has become
much, much, much better
as the technology has
become optimized."

fear that cloned animals like

Dolly were going to be
prematurely aged?

Silver: During the normal

process of aging, our cells'

chromosomes' tips become
shorter and shorter. When the
tips of our chromosomes
become too short, the cell dies and, in fact, the body containing those
cells dies with it. So there was a worry that if you take a cell from an
adult animal, whose chromosome tips have already begun to become
shortened, and you took that cell and brought into existence a new
animal, that cloned animal would start its life at a higher level in the
aging process.
So people feared that Dolly was prematurely aged. And when Dolly's
chromosomes were looked at, the tips of her chromosomes were a
little bit shorter than one would expect for animals her age. So
everybody said, "Oh, Dolly is prematurely aging."
Now, if you actually look at the animal, she is not prematurely aging.
She is exactly the way you would expect for animals her age. It turns
out that her chromosome tips were just a little bit shorter than expected
and probably within the range of normality for her age.

NOVA: The newest research is showing that these animals are not
aging, but, in fact, they might even be younger?

Silver: New research has come out that shows that contrary to what
people thought originally, the cloning process rejuvenates cells. We
can understand why that happens, because during the normal process
of embryogenesis, when the embryo is normally developing, the
chromosome tips get longer. That's the reason we can exist as a
species generation after generation after generation. It's during
embryogenesis that chromosomes are rejuvenated. And, in fact,
cloning rejuvenates the chromosomes of the cell that the
chromosomes came from.

NOVA: So besides helping infertile couples have babies, how else

could cloning help people? One thing you mention in your book is how
cloning could bypass certain genetic disabilities that could be passed
on.

Silver: I think the best example

I'll give you is the following: In the
"Cloning bypasses the
normal course of reproduction
by sexual intercourse about four process of dividing the
percent of children are born with
birth defects. A major cause of DNA in half, so you
birth defects is that when the
would expect animals
sperm and eggs are being
made, their genetic material is produced by cloning to
being divided in half, and in that have fewer chromosomal
process, sometimes the division
problems."
doesn't work exactly right, and
sometimes eggs or sperm end
up with one too many chromosomes, and that causes birth defects.
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Cloning bypasses the process of dividing the DNA in half, so you

would expect animals produced by cloning to have fewer
chromosomal problems, and you'd reduce that cause of birth defect.
The other birth defect problem is caused when two parents
unknowingly are carriers for a disease like sickle-cell anemia or cystic
fibrosis, and then 25 percent of their children are going to have that
awful disease. With cloning you bypass that. Because if the adult
doesn't have sickle-cell anemia or some disease like that, the child
won't have that disease either. Now, cloning may cause other kinds of
birth defects, which will need to be controlled before the technology
could be used for human reproduction.

NOVA: You also mention advantages that cloning could have that
have nothing to do with reproduction.

Silver: Let me give you an example. If you have leukemia, you will die
unless you can find a bone-marrow transplant. The problem is, if you
take a random person off the street and use that person's bone
marrow to put into your body, there will be a rejection. Your body will
recognize that bone marrow as foreign and will reject it. Ideally, you'd
like to have an identical twin, because you could take the bone marrow
from your identical twin and put it into you, and your body wouldn't see
it as foreign, because genetically it's the same.
What cloning will allow scientists
in the future is to take a
"All kinds of tissues could tocelldofrom
your body and
be regenerated through reprogram itlike rebooting a
computer back to the embryonic
the cloning process to
stateand guide that cell to
allow people to survive develop into a particular tissue
or organ. So you could guide
pretty awful diseases."
that embryonic cell into bone
marrow, and then you can put
the bone marrow back into that person, who actually donated the cell in
the first place, so you're giving that person his or her own bone
marrow.
Or for Parkinson's disease patients, you're giving the person his or her
own neurons, not somebody else's neurons. And all kinds of tissues
could be regenerated through the cloning process to allow people to
survive pretty awful diseases, by giving them their own cells back into
their bodies. So this is a very, very powerful use of the technology,
which could overcome disease and suffering. And most scientists
think this is a perfectly valid use of the technology.

NOVA: So you're never allowing these cloned cells to develop into a

baby?

Silver: I think it's important to understand that we understand the

process of development so well that you could take a one-cell embryo,
which is not differentiated yet, and by putting certain proteins on that
embryo, you can make that embryo grow into bone marrow. Not a
fetus, not a child, just a mass of tissue. And so you can turn an embryo
into a mass of tissue that has no kind of conscious ability or anything
like that. Then you can take this tissue and give it back to the person
who produced the cell in the first place. I think this is a perfectly
legitimate use of cloning technology that everybody should be able to
accept.

NOVA: And you would argue that, when and if it happens, using
cloning to produce human babies is not something we should worry
about?

Silver: People are upset about human cloning, when I'm quite
confident that human cloning will never have an impact on society,
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because most people want to have children with their partners.

At the moment, cloning provides
a way for sterile people to have
biological offspring. But we're
going to go beyond cloning,
where it's possible to take a skin
cell, and turn a skin cell into an
egg or turn a skin cell into
sperm. This means that we will
be able to overcome the worst
cases of sterility and then allow
people to do what they always
wanted to do, which is to have
children with their partner.

"I'm quite confident that

human cloning will never
have an impact on
society, because most
people want to have
children with their
partners."

There will be very, very few cases in which people really are going to
want to have children by themselves. The only legitimate case I can
think of is a 35- or 40-year-old woman who doesn't have a partner and
who wants to have a baby by herself. She won't need a sperm donor,
who can bring in all sorts of terrible diseases. She'll just say, "Well, why
do I need a sperm donor? I'm just going to use my own genetic
material to have a child, since I'm going to raise it myself anyway?"
For most other people, for 99 percent of the population, they'll use new
reproductive technologies to have babies that have two parents, and
we're back to where we began.

NOVA: You've stated, in fact, that genetic engineering could have a

much greater impact on society than human cloning.

Silver: Genetic engineering is so much bigger than cloning, and

people don't realize it. Genetic engineering has been with us for 20
years, and when it first came out in 1980, people didn't understand it
enough to be able to be afraid of it, when, in fact, genetic engineering
is much more scary than cloning.

NOVA: Why?
Silver: Genetical engineering is already perfected in animals, and it
can produce incredible outcomes. We can produce mice that have
been engineered not to get cancer. We can produce mice that have
much, much greater learning and memory ability. In theory, we can use
the same technology on human embryos to provide all sorts of health
advantages to the children that emerge from those embryos. And we
can go beyond that. Once we understand the genes behind personality
behavior and cognitive traits, parents are going to be able to give their
kids all sorts of cognitive advantages in life.
There's no question this
can be used in this
"Genetic engineering is technology
way. Most scientists are afraid
to talk about it in public,
much more scary than
because they're afraid of the
cloning."
reaction, but there's no
geneticist today who will tell you
this can't be done. They will tell you it won't be done; people won't want
to do this. And I disagree, because I think that once the technology is
usable in a safe way, parents will jump at the chance to give
advantages to their children.

NOVA: What's so scary about that?

Silver: The scary part is the ethical dilemma that arises between the
rights of individual parents who want to advantage their child and the
good of society as a whole. Here those two notions come into severe
conflict with each other, because genetic engineering will allow the
affluent part of Western society, which will eventually include the middle
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class, it will allow this large group of Americans and people in other
Western societies to jump ahead in terms of the advantages their
children start life with. It will increase the gap between those who have
moneycountries with money, people with moneyand those who
don't. It will cause a permanent division potentially between these two
groups of people, and that would be pretty bad for humanity.

NOVA: What do you mean by permanent? Do you mean they would

reach a point where they would be genetically incompatible?

Silver: Let me tell you the two

problems with this. Today,
genes are handed out randomly, "It could reach the point
which means that even in the
where people in the upper
worst ghetto in the worst city in
genetic class could no
the world, there are children
being born who have the
longer breed with people
potential to succeed as much as
who were not genetically
any child coming out of an
upper-class neighborhood,
engineered."
because at the level of birth,
there is the same kind of genetic
diversity across the entire world. So that's kind of good. There's a limit
to how far people who are in the upper socioeconomic class can go
relative to people in the lower socioeconomic class. In theory, people
can jump from the bottom class to the top class in every generation.
With genetic engineering, it might stop that process, because if the
upper class is able to give its children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren more and more and more genetic advantages, they will
move the class so far away from the people who are naturally born that
the people in the natural class will have no way of jumping into this
upper class, and that would be a permanent divide in society.
Eventually, if this went on long enough, it could reach the point where
people in the upper genetic class could no longer breed with people
who were not genetically engineered, which would lead to a division of
our species into two or more separate species.

Back to On Human Cloning

Interview conducted by Sarah Holt, producer, "18 Ways to Make a Baby"

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