As one who studied the life sciences a long time ago, I am fascinated by the possibility of cloning human beings. It's a perverse fascination that had its genesis, I think, in the late 20th century's worship of science and technology. Those were the years after Sputnik, the years Americans walked on the moon and assumed Star Trek one day would not be fiction.
It was the start of mapping the human genome, which held the promise of new ways to diagnose and treat disease. It was birth control and fertility drugs, computers and eventually the Internet. It was cell phones and satellite television. It was miracle drugs and miracle cures.
We learned and believed -- and results have confirmed -- that anything imagined by dreamers and visionaries often becomes reality when scientists and the marketplace go to work.
The question shadowing the cloning debate: Should we, simply because we can?
It's the same question that pricked the consciences of scientists who developed the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, N.M. It's the question that was not answered when the first test-tube babies were created some 25 years ago. It's the question that bedevils the world today as a new claim of human cloning makes headlines.
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But it's too late. To cliché this one to death: The genie is out of the bottle. The cat is out of the bag. We're trying to close the barn door after the horse has gone.
The cloning story that broke last week added a bizarre twist to the debate. A sect called the Raelians said it had cloned a girl and named her Eve. How's that for original? But what's especially weird is the Raelians believe their leader, Rael, was visited in 1973 by a space alien who told him extraterrestrials had created all life on Earth by genetic engineering. Clonaid, the company that claims to have created Eve, retains philosophical links to the Raelians, but no economic ties.
So, rational persons are faced with the possibility that a space alien cult company has cloned a human being, and that the cloners further believe that all human life was genetically engineered by some version of E.T.
Does it get any better than this? Any stranger? Any more troubling? It has all the elements of a Michael Crichton science fiction novel.
DNA tests on Eve are scheduled this week. The tests will be done by independent experts and are supposed to tell the world whether Eve is a hoax or the real thing.
We'll see. The space alien factor tilts the story toward hoax. But cloning animals as complex as sheep is not a hoax. It has been done by legitimate scientists. Somewhere, someone is taking that next big step: cloning a human being.
Let's hope it's not a sect of loonies who believe in genetic manipulation by a close encounter of the third kind. Dealing with the impending reality of a human clone will be burden enough, thank you.
Zaleski can be reached at jzaleski@forumcomm.com or (701) 241-5521.
