HUMAN CLONE

THE HUMAN CLONING!

THE animal cloning has moved from closed-door laboratories to commercial application. The $50,000 feline was delivered by Genetic Savings & Clone, the playfully named company catering to particularly devoted pet owners.

While the intentions of the pet owners are understandable, the practice itself is rife with hazard and requires a decisive response from policy-makers. There are many practical problems with pet cloning, not the least of which is that the genetic duplicate may turn out to act, and even look, different from its forebear. Each creature shaped in part by life experience is more than an embodiment of his or her DNA. A cloned animal may look much the same and bring back happy memories for pet lovers, but the creature they are looking at is not the same animal.

More to the point, with millions of healthy and adoptable cats and dogs being killed each year for lack of suitable homes, it's a little frivolous to be cloning departed pets. The challenge is not to find new, absurdly expensive ways to create animals, but to curb the growth of pet populations and to foster an ethic in society that prompts people to adopt and shelter creatures in need of loving homes.

Pet cloning is simply not worth repeating. Behind this one little kitten are far grander schemes to clone animals for use in agriculture and research. Before such projects become the norm, we should pause and think carefully about where it is leading -- for animals and for humanity.

It was big news some years ago when scientists in Scotland announced the cloning of Dolly the sheep. This new technology marked a decisive moment in our ability to manipulate the natural world to suit our designs. Dolly has long since passed, afflicted by a lung disease that typically occurs in much older sheep. Since her dramatic birth -- and her pitiful decline -- scientists have turned out clones for mice, rabbits, goats, pigs, cows and now cats. Cloned horses and dogs, we are promised, are on the way. But behind every heralded success are hundreds of monstrous failures.

As all of this has unfolded, policy-makers have stood idly by, 

failing to place any restraints of law and ethics on corporations and scientists who are tinkering here with the most fundamental elements of biology. We hear indignation and expressions of well-founded concern about human cloning. But we hear hardly a word of doubt or moral concern about the idea of animal cloning, much less about the particular animals subjected to these experiments. It won't be long before biotech companies in the hire of agribusiness announce plans to sell commercial clones as food. Cloned ham, steak, and even drumsticks may be served at retail operations in the future, and there's no law to forbid the sale of meat or milk from clones produced in a laboratory.

Like pet cloning, the cloning of farm animals is monumentally unnecessary. Farmers are already producing so much meat that they must find export markets to turn a profit. As for milk, it's cheaper than bottled water. The dairy industry recently "culled" tens of thousands of healthy dairy cows in order to depress production.

Small farmers, already put at a disadvantage by mounting debt and mechanized competitors, will be further marginalized as cloning practices become commonplace. More than ever, they'll be at the mercy of corporate factory farms to purchase their supply of clones.

Consumers face threats of a different sort. Who knows if consuming meat and milk from clones is safe? A recent Food and Drug Administration symposium addressed this issue, but the confident declarations that the animal products are safe didn't seem all that reassuring The production of genetically identical animals would pose serious threats to food security. Genetic variation, already low from conventional breeding, would also be almost eliminated by cloning.

As for the animals in our factory farms, cloning is the final assault on their well-being and dignity. When the FDA held a public consultation on animal cloning in November 2003, researchers reported a graphic list of problems for clones and their surrogate mothers in cattle, pigs, sheep and goats a string of developmental abnormalities and a host of deaths before, during and after birth. The animals being cloned exhibit grievous problems, such as cows with grossly enlarged udders, major leg problems and other forms of lameness. And these are the very animals trumpeted as success stories.

Of the largest group of clones yet  produced by Cyagra, which clones cattle  few embryos survived to term, and of those that did, a third then died by the age of 1 year. The FDA's report, "Animal Cloning: A Risk Assessment" put a nice spin on this when it said that "the proportion of live, normal births appears to be increasing." In other words, the situation has improved from atrocious to very bad.

It is time for Congress and the FDA and other regulatory bodies to engage in the animal-cloning debate. Many of the ethical concerns raised by human cloning apply to this reckless disregard for the integrity of animal life. Should such questions be left entirely to scientists and corporations, since they have an intellectual and commercial stake in these projects? Our government alone can stand up for the public interest in preventing this cruelty.

Cloning is a startling procedure, to be sure, and many scientists would have us view it as some inevitable stage in our technological development. But humanity's progress is not always defined by scientific innovation alone. Cloning  both human and animal  is one of those cases in which progress is defined by the exercise of wisdom and of self-restraint.