Downloaded From www.AllSubs.org
Rome's Medical School has never seen anything quite like it.
Prof Severino Antinori said hundreds of couples have already agreed to take part in his experiment.
These two scientists claim they're about to do something that many believe is both dangerous and wrong.
The genie is out of the bottle.
Something so extraordinary that it could alter the very evolution of our species.
We don't need any permissions from anybody.
They say that next month in a secret laboratory they will try to clone a human being.
We'll be careful.
But in the last few months
new research has revealed hidden dangers
so terrifying that most scientists now believe human cloning would be disastrous.
So is science really ready to clone a human?
Can I have a word with you?
Where are you going?
I think I'm needed elsewhere.
K9,
cloning techniques, give me a rundown, state-of-the-art so far.
Cloning.
Cloning is replication, making a copy of an individual from a single cell of that individual.
Clones - clones retain characteristics of original organism.
Go on, go on!
Cloning would be a completely new way of making a human being.
Instead of the combination of father's sperm and mother's egg that makes each of us unique,
cloning will create a baby from a single cell from a single person.
The clone will be an identical genetic copy.
Cloning does not create anything new.
It creates a genetic copy of an existing being.
People have a, an extraordinary emotional reaction
to cloning
because it's, it conjures up all sorts of images:
duplication,
the images from science-fiction of factory reproduction
and it really makes them face the notion
that our technology is going to allow us to intervene
even in the most intimate processes of our lives,
so this is really big stuff.
Whatever its opponents say there are people who will try the new technology.
For infertile couples who cannot make babies with sperm and eggs,
cloning is a medical breakthrough that could give them children of their own.
Desirée and Matthew are willing to take the first steps into this brave new worid.
Two years ago cancer treatment left Desirée infertile.
I look at Matt and I look at, you know,
people our age
and they're just getting started with their family
and their wife is pregnant and they're so excited,
you know, it's their first baby and...
and it, it makes me sad to think that I will never be able to do that for him.
In desperation they tried to adopt a child,
but at the last moment the arrangement fell through.
Anxious for another solution Desirée began searching the Internet.
There she found what she had thought impossible,
an extraordinary new way to have a child genetically their own.
This was cloning.
And when he got home I just met him at the door,
I was so excited, you know, look, look, there's you know something out there
different than what we found.
I think at first I thought she was just full of it and it was just a big hoax...
...on the Internet and then... That's what I thought too.
But the more they found out,
the more convinced they became that cloning was a real possibility
and the only one that could give them what they wanted.
And then I realised wow, you know, something else that, that might help us,
so it, it was a very good, good discovery.
Just like another light at the end of the tunnel. ~Yeah, yeah.
The men who claim they can help couples like Desirée and Matthew
travel the worid to champion their cause.
Last summer Dr Panayiotis Zavos came to Oxford
to put the case for cloning to some of the biggest names in British science.
Good evening, good evening everyone and welcome to Oxford Unión debates.
Everybody that comes to see us as infertility specialists wants a child
yesterdayif at all possible
and the second thing is they want a healthy child, therefore...
Dr Zavos is not a cloning expert,
but at his fertility clinic in Kentucky
he already makes a living from making babies
and at $50,000 a try, cloning will be a lucrative business.
...and therefore everybody needs to understand that we are responsible individuals
understanding the needs of people that are not here tonight.
Infertility patients don't rise
like everybody else that rises here and wants to make a point.
It's a silent disease and therefore we need to address that.
Madam President, ladies and gentlemen...
But many scientists are not impressed.
...unethical. What you are doing is incredibly disreputable.
What you are doing is utterly appalling.
Do you know, I don't mind if you clone a human being actually,
because I think you would get the full force of the law
when inevitably you produce an abnormal child
and the parents of the child will sue you through the court
and God help you when that happens and you deserve the full force of the law,
whether it be in the United States or in Italy.
What Dr Zavos and his colleagues are proposing
has so far only ever been done in animals.
They will take an egg from a woman and remove its nucleus,
the part which contains her DNA.
They will be left with a hollow egg.
Next they will take a cell from the body of the adult who is to be cloned.
It's from this cell that they will make a new human being,
an identical genetic copy.
The way an adult would be cloned would be
you have to take a cell from that adult
and you might be able to get that from a tissue swab in the cheek
or from a scraping of skin or from a little biopsy
and the cell would then be taken to the laboratory.
Once they have selected the cell
scientists will take its DNA and insert it into the empty egg.
Then they will have to stimulate the egg to begin to grow.
They might use an electric shock
and add chemicals,
the methods used in animals.
No one understands how or why,
but this process should switch the adult cell back
to become the very first cell of life.
The new embryo will be grown in a dish for a few days,
then implanted into a woman's womb
where it might grow into a human being.
This human would be a clone.
Nine months later you would have a child
and the only difference between that child
and a child that had been conceived normally
would be that the child would have the exact same genetic constitution
as the individual who donate,
donated the original tissue, the original nucleus.
It's the promise of that identical genetic constitution
that makes some people see cloning as a way to raise the dead.
Earlier this year Al Powell's mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Devastated, he found hope in the idea that cloning could give her a second chance.
I followed like the cloning controversy
and then it just kind of
like I start thinking about, you know,
the possibility of cloning my Mom
'cos at that time this is just 2½ months maybe before she died,
I realised she wasn't going to live that long.
But to be able to clone their mother in the future
they would have to get a tissue sample from her and have it frozen,
and they couldn't find a scientist willing to do the job.
It had come down to where my brother and I were going to do it
after my Mom passed away
and so we contacted someone who told us how to do it.
You could either do it from like the upper arm
or from her, from her leg, from her lower leg
and you could actually do it with like, you know, scissors,
everything would have to be sterilised, you'd use gloves.
Fortunately they didn't have to
and a doctor agreed to perform the vital operation properly.
I just went in, just my, just by myself with a doctor
and we actually had six phials.
Then he took some, some tissue samples,
you know, little, you know he cut 'em up
and put 'em in the samples and then sealed them.
We actually then, next day, we FedEx'd them to this laboratory.
Now six pieces of Al's mother are frozen in a vat somewhere in America
waiting for the era of human cloning to begin,
but until recently many thought that era would never come.
For over 30 years researchers had been trying to clone animals from adult cells.
It had never worked.
By the 1980s many leading scientists were saying it was impossible.
If you asked some geneticist 25 years ago
whether we would do, be doing the things that we're doing today,
even whether we would know the sequence of the entire human genome,
they would have said no way that's going to happen in that period of time.
But in February 1997 the age of cloning began with a sheep called Dolly.
#Isn't it strange#
#Feels like I'm lookin' in the mirror#
#What would people say#
#If only they knew that I was#
#Part of some geneticist's plan #
#Born to be a carbon copy man #
#Born in a science lab late one night#
#Without a mother or a father, just a test tube and a womb with a view#
#I think I'm a clone now #
#There's always two of me just a-hangin' around#
#I think I'm a clone now...#
So far cloning has been successful in sheep, cattle, pigs, goats and mice.
But the scientists doing it were never aiming to make human babies.
Instead they see cloning as a new kind of farming,
a way to create animals genetically engineered for our benefit.
ACTUALITY AUCTIONEERING DIALOGUE
In the next few years this cattle fair might be trading animals which make human anti-bodies,
or medicines, in their milk.
This will be possible because of cloning.
Genetically engineer one animal
and you'll be able to clone a whole herd.
And away from the hype about cloned babies
mainstream scientists do also see good reason for cloning from human cells.
They're hoping to treat incurable conditions like Parkinson's or heart disease
by growing new brain or heart cells cloned from the patient.
But behind all the optimism lies a stark reality.
At the Roslin Institute, the lab which made history with Dolly,
scientists have found their success very hard to repeat.
For every one hundred cells injected into eggs
typically only two or three clones will be born alive.
Most will either fail to start growing into an embryo at all,
or fail to implant in the womb
and in the few cases where pregnancies begin
many of the cloned animals die before they even make it to birth.
It can happen at any time during the development of pregnancy.
Sometimes my colleagues would see the placenta going wrong,
sometimes things would look perfectly normal,
you'd be expecting a live birth
within a few days and the, the lamb would die,
the foetus would die because of some abnormality that you couldn't detect by ultrasound.
Then there was the strange case of a cloned lamb
which began life seeming perfectly normal.
We were very excited by the fact that it was born naturally
and was essentially very healthy,
except for one thing which was that it panted all the time,
just the same way that you and I would if we'd been running for a hundred yards,
but all of the time night and day
and obviously my veterinary colleagues took advice from other vets
and from the Children's Hospital
and tried any of the treatments that were recommended,
but unfortunately none of them were able to correct the condition.
And it wasn't just the Roslin lambs.
Around the worid some clones were dying of bizarre, inexplicable conditions.
In cloned animals of all the different species
there've been an enormous variety of, of different abnormalities.
In the kidneys, the livers, the hearts, the blood vessels,
the skin, the musculature of the, the body wall...
...heart defects, limb abnormalities and facial abnormalities, but not...
...the newborns have been born with their insides on the outside.
We know that they have immunological problems, they have pulmonary problems, they have cardiac...
...within hours of birth they tend to die...
...the musculature of the, the body wall, the brain, the face. I think...
...some of them are able to breathe, but only breathe if they're on oxygen.
Whoever heard of a calf grazing with oxygen on its back?
Scientists had to get to the bottom of the mysterious deaths.
They took the organs from clones which had died and prepared tissue samples.
Pathologist Susan Rhind was one of the first
to examine samples from dead clones under the microscope.
What she has found is shocking.
These lambs showed serious problems with their breathing
so an obvious place to start looking
was in the lung tissue itself
to see if there was any problems there
and if we look at a section here from a normal lamb
and what we've got here is a large airway
bringing the air down into the lung
and if we can focus on this structure here which is a blood vessel
and at this same magnification move on to looking at the lung from a cloned lamb,
we can see instantly how different they are from the normal.
We have a blood vessel which is massively enlarged
and the size of this is really far beyond what one would normally expect in a normal lung.
The more samples she looked at the worse the picture became.
This next slide here is too big to even put on the screen.
I mean this is, is an even more massively enlarged vessel.
The lambs' hearts couldn't cope with the task
of trying to push blood round gigantic vessels 20 times bigger than they should be.
These clones had no chance.
It's not possible to pick up these abnormalities by ultrasound and carry out...
For the Roslin Institute Science Director, Harry Griffin,
the fate of clones like these should sound a warning to anyone who wants to clone a human.
...told us that this animal was suffering from a major cardiovascular problem that was untreatable.
We put this animal down
because we didn't want it to suffer any longer.
Now if any of you are tempted with the idea of cloning a human being,
and I would ask Dr Zavos this question,
given that sort of defect what would he do with it?
All those experiments that is done in animals today
are obviously done on a hit and miss type basis...
But Dr Zavos insists
that long experience of making human babies makes him a safer pair of hands.
...Dr Zavos has been producing children for the last 25 years
and not one single baby, abnormal baby was born ever
and we don't intend to have one single child ever be born
from such an effort, ever.
Lambs are lambs, humans are humans.
Dr Griffin has to realise what the difference is
and that's what the difference is. Thank you.
The difference in this case of course is that
in the UK and elsewhere we're allowed to experiment on lambs,
we're not allowed to experiment on human beings.
And the point that I'm...
Dr Zavos may be confident
but the more the scientists examined different organs from dead clones
the worse the picture became.
They found a bizarre array of deformities never seen in nature.
On the left is a cross-section of a kidney from a normal lamb,
on the right, on the same scale, are cross-sections from two clones.
These kidneys are shrunken with much of their tissue missing
and there were other problems.
A normal lamb's liver is mostly made up of healthy liver cells,
seen here in pink,
but in the clones most of the liver was made of strange, unspecialised cells
that couldn't function as liver cells.
The implications for human cloning were terrifying.
If a human baby born with these kinds of defects were to survive at all
many scientists now believe it would suffer devastating illnesses unknown to medicine,
but Dr Zavos and his Italian associate, Dr Severino Antinori,
are confident they can produce healthy human clones.
We have no intentions to step over dead bodies or deformed babies to accomplish this.
I'm not sure
to permit to continue the pregnancy
if there is some abnormality.
And the prospect of having an abnormal child
is not enough to deter people desperate for a family.
Couples like Desirée and Matthew seem to have no idea how profound the problems might be.
But even if there was something wrong with the child
we wouldn't toss the child away.
We'd both still raise it to the best of our ability and treat it as a normal child.
I would be like, me, if I could get pregnant myself
and we found out at five months that it,
you know it didn't have an arm or a leg or something,
I mean then telling us we could abort it I don't really think we would.
I don't see us being that type of people, you know.
We created it we're going, you know it's our responsibility.
But the scientists who had seen the scale of the problems
knew they had to get to the bottom of what was going wrong.
They tested many theories.
Perhaps clones made from adult cells were just dying from premature old age,
perhaps cloning was causing strange mutations in their genes,
but everything they looked at seemed normal.
Many began to suspect that the problem lay in the great mystery at the heart of cloning:
how could a single cell taken from an adult make a whole new animal, or human?
We have a system which has evolved over millions of years to make fertilisation work,
very effectively usually,
and what we are asking it to do is something totally different,
so really we shouldn't be surprised that it doesn't work very well.
In a way almost we should be surprised that it does work sometimes.
The way we are made is incredibly complex.
Our genes are like the plates on a printing press.
Each gene is a template that produces a message.
To operate they need to be switched on
and when they're switched on the different genes produce different messages
that tell the cells how to build all the organs and tissues we need.
To make a healthy human
our genes need to be switched on at the right time
in an intricate cascade
and crucially when a process is complete they need to be switched off again,
but the bizarre defects in cloned animals, like the massive blood vessels,
suggested that something was going wrong with these critical instructions,
so researchers began the quest to discover the problem.
The first clue was to come from a scientist who wasn't doing cloning,
but was working in a related area: IVF.
For years scientists had been puzzled by the fact
that some animals made by IVF for selective breeding
grew dangerously large in the womb,
something that also happens to clones.
When Lorraine Young first set out to discover what was going wrong
it seemed an impossible task.
To try and pinpoint what was going wrong
was essentially a needle in a haystack type exercise.
There are about 30,000 genes in every cell in, in an embryo
and really any one of those could be going wrong.
The answer to why the animals were growing too big
could lie anywhere among 30,000 genes,
but Dr Young knew of something which might help narrow the search.
It was a rare disease in humans - Beckwith Wiedemann syndrome.
Thelma was born with symptoms of Beckwith Wiedemann syndrome.
It's a disease in which a vital few genes that control how we grow go wrong.
When Thelma was born
she ended up being born with a part of her intestines
formed outside of her stomach wall
and she required surgery within one or two days of having been born.
Beckwith Wiedemann syndrome causes dangerous errors in the way babies grow.
They're often born very large with huge tongues
and other problems that have to be corrected with surgery
and cells in the liver and kidney can also grow out of control causing tumours.
All this is caused by an error
in the functioning of one of a small number of genes
that control how babies grow.
As a result, too much growth factor may be produced
which in turn causes the tumours and abnormal growth.
Thelma will have to have ultrasound scans every three months
until she is eight to check for tumours.
Well we try to go into these screenings very optimistic every time,
but you never know if it's going to be OK until you, till the doctor,
you know, takes his look and says it's OK
and you try not to think about what it would be like
if they came back and said it's not OK,
that it means cancer,
you know, and you don't want your child to go through that.
Now Lorraine Young had a hunch
that the same group of genes that caused problems in children like Thelma
could also be making the IVF animals and clones grow too big.
She began comparing the chemical signals coming from these genes
in healthy lambs and overgrown lambs.
It would take many months of painstaking work,
but finally she found a crucial difference.
One of the genes she was studying is meant to keep growth under control,
but Dr Young found it wasn't producing strong enough signals
and when she analysed it
she found that something vital was missing.
The switch that should turn the gene on,
a tiny molecule called a methyl molecule
wasn't where it should be.
Without this switch the gene wouldn't work
and the animal would grow out of control.
This observation shows
that loss of these methyl groups from the DNA was enough to make the animals grow large
and this was our most important result to date.
Dr Young had done her work in IVF animals,
but perhaps the same thing was going wrong in clones,
perhaps the abnormalities were caused by switches like methyl molecules being disturbed.
To test this theory scientists around the worid began to look at tissue from clones
to see whether metal molecules had gone awry.
Like other scientists, Dr Zavos had also read about Lorraine Young's findings.
We're going to begin doing human reproductive cloning as early as probably 30-60 days from now.
I... and see that as a problem, and unless...
For him a problem found was as good as a problem solved.
Horizon has tracked down a document
in which Zavos claims he can actually make cloning safer
by screening cloned embryos for the sort of errors Dr Young found
and only using ones that look normal.
Frankly I think the claims are ludicrous and absolutely irresponsible.
I find there's absolutely no scientific basis for them.
It's poorly referenced and there's no real explanation of how he will do things.
It just demonstrates a complete lack of scientific understanding in my opinion.
Dr Zavos couldn't be interviewed by Horizon
because he's tied in to a broadcasting contract elsewhere,
but he claims that if the embryo has normal-looking methyl molecules on its growth genes
he will assume it's healthy.
He and Dr Antinori believe that tests like these will prevent many abnormalities.
We will check and complete the procedure to monitor, to avoid 99% the abnormality.
But Dr Young believes that the problem doesn't just affect the genes she's looked at,
it could affect any gene.
There could easily still be problems in a whole range of other genes.
He's going to be missing absolutely thousands of other problems.
I mean he's going to be missing everything.
In the last few months Dr Young's research has been backed up by other studies.
Around the worid scientists have published the first results
showing that cloning sometimes causes vital methyl molecules to go awry on many genes.
These results have led some scientists to a radical and devastating conclusión:
that cloning can cause random errors in the switching of any one of 30,000 genes.
The clone may develop normally until some key gene,
like a time bomb, causes disaster
and they believe human cloning would be just as risky.
The most likely outcome would include late abortions,
the birth of dead children
and perhaps worst of all, the birth of children which survive but which were abnormal.
And the risks don't end when we're born
because as our bodies change at key stages in our lives
we're dependent on genes switching on and off at the right time.
Things can go wrong at any time.
There are some genes which, for example,
are necessary to make a child go through adolescence
and not really important before then,
so if you have an abnormality in that gene
the child might not become a, a, a normal adolescent
and you could see failures at, at any time of development.
That I think is what we should anticipate
if anybody clones a person with our present techniques.
But there are other scientists who believe the case against cloning is hugely exaggerated
and that these early problems will be quickly overcome.
To take those very early experiments which look at only a handful of genes
and try to make some grand statement that cloning will never be feasible in humans
or that it will be a very hard process
or to make any assumption of that sort
is unwarranted
given the very preliminary nature of these studies.
Dr Zavos and his team also think their opponents are exaggerating the risks.
Hello Dolly.
He ridicules recent claims that Dolly herself
may have something wrong with her brain.
Now Dolly was doing OK until recently when we heard the news
and I was shocked Dolly does have an IQ problem.
For crying out loud after four or five years old Dolly is, is stupid.
Now for the life of me
neither Oxford nor any other institution has developed an IQ test for sheep.
Let's get serious ladies and gentlemen.
You cannot do that.
Of course I, I know about sheep because I was a sheep herder during my early life
and I can tell you that I haven't met a sheep that is, has got an IQ above minus 10.
And scare tactics are one thing,
the facts of life are another
and we need to stick with the facts.
What is a clone?
Mother Nature has its way of doing cloning.
That is the identical twinning.
The embryo splits and gives rise to two lovely children.
A lady called me...
Dr Zavos is right.
Nature already creates thousands of completely normal clones every year,
but recent research has revealed some remarkable cases of twins
who are changing scientists' view of what will happen if humans are cloned.
Oh what a shot, that's right.
Ricky and Erica are twins.
It's always special for every father to be in the delivery room for the first time.
It was exciting, very exciting.
She wanted a girl and I wanted a boy
and we were happy, you know, like...
Very excited.
We had what we wanted and...
we had the millionaires family without the million dollars.
It was nice.
Because they were different sexes
everybody thought that the babies were non-identical, or fraternal twins,
conceived when two separate eggs were fertilised by two separate sperm.
They would be as alike, or unalike, as any brother and sister.
This seemed to be confirmed when Ricky was born healthy, but Erica was not.
She had some worrying symptoms.
Suspecting a rare genetic illness,
scientists did full genetic fingerprinting tests on both twins
and what they discovered was astonishing.
They're identical twins.
I guess they are identical twins, but they're... But they're boy and girl.
But they're boy and girl,
so like you know the, what are the odds of having identical twins,
boy and a girl - one in ten million? I don't know.
You have to be a scientist to understand. To understand that one.
With Ricky and Erica,
nature's intended clones had turned out to be very different,
so what went wrong?
The genetic tests revealed that the reason lay in their chromosomes.
Ricky and Erica started off as a single, fertilised egg with an X and Y chromosome.
With an X and Y this embryo should have become a boy,
but as the first cells divided
one cell lost its Y chromosome
so some cells began to form which only had an X.
Then the embryo split.
One half had mostly XY cells - this became Ricky.
The other half had only cells with just one X -
this survived to become a baby girl, Erica,
but it takes two X chromosomes to make a normal girl,
so Erica is different.
Giris with a missing X have a disease called Turner's syndrome.
...one, two, three, go!
Happy birthday to me! I know...
Happy birthday to you!
The twins are celebrating their eleventh birthday,
but Erica is fortunate to have reached this age.
She has had to have heart surgery
and have her ovaries removed
and as both twins approach adolescence the future looks uncertain.
This weekend she's 11 years old
and it's creeping up on me
and I think about it every day, the day I have to,
you know, explain to her that she's not like every, every other little girl
and when it comes to having a child
he'll have to know that
she's... can't do it like everyone else has.
Some scientists argue that if making clones naturally
can result in unfortunate genetic diseases
then man-made clones will be at much greater risk,
but to others, making babies by any means is always going to be risky,
so cloning is not exceptional.
The truth is that natural reproduction is a very, very dangerous procedure.
We have abnormalities all the time.
We have natural miscarriages
and we have 3-4% of actual children
that are born who have genetic abnormalities of one sort or another.
We can't ask for absolute safety with cloning,
but we can ask for a level of safety
that is similar to those with other reproductive procedures.
Within a few seconds of birth there was a huge, loud howl from Louise
and the baby had arrived.
23 years ago a healthy baby girl called Louise
overturned people's fears about interfering with reproduction.
Louise was the first test-tube baby
made by bringing sperm and egg together in a dish.
Today IVF is routine
and Doctors Zavos and Antinori claim that cloning will be just as safe.
Whatever the consequences are you will go ahead with it?
There are not going to be any consequences.
We think that we can, we can hit as high as IVF success
which is about 30% in the US right now.
But over the past decade a new form of IVF has emerged
which is far more invasive.
In a technique called ICSI
weak sperm which could not penetrate an egg naturally
are injected with a needle.
Until human cloning is attempted
ICSI is the only model we have
to judge how human cells will stand up to the kinds of manipulations which cloning will involve.
Although ICSI has produced thousands of healthy babies,
a small number of scientists have begun to report problems.
Several have linked ICSI to a higher risk of abnormalities.
Some of the problems are likely to be inherited from the faulty sperm,
but does the technique itself,
which involves injecting DNA into the heart of an egg,
cause problems?
In the US one team decided to compare what happened to sperm and egg
during the first few hours after normal fertilisation and after ICSI.
They saw some worrying differences.
These are human sperm
prior to fertilisation
and you can see
that they have this necktie like structure
around the equator of the sperm chromosomes.
During fertilisation naturally,
this necktie would be lost at the surface of the egg,
but in contrast after ICSI here is a sperm in the egg
and you can see that the red collar persists
and that the sperm is not inflating uniformly
as a round balloon but instead is constricted by that necktie.
In nature a sperm's DNA would swell uniformly
ready to combine with an egg's DNA,
but after ICSI they found the sperm's packaging got in the way
and the vital sex chromosome became trapped.
The implications for cloning are serious
because instead of injecting a sperm
they'll use the nucleus of a completely different kind of cell
that was never designed to meet an egg,
so the potential for this kind of error is much greater.
Contrast that with cloning an animal like Dolly.
Well first the mother's chromosomes are removed.
We don't know what else is removed when the mother's chromosomes are removed.
We don't wake the egg up by having a sperm wake the egg up.
Frequently we use an electric zap.
I mean is, is electrocution the best way to start off in life.
It certainly isn't the method that's mirrored naturally.
But still Doctors Zavos and Antinori claim they're on the brink of the experiment
that will alter the course of human evolution.
Of course we're going to go ahead with it, no matter what.
The infertility couples are the ones that make those decisions,
not us,
not them,
nobody else.
We are considering 200 couples.
That doesn't mean that 200 couples will be cloned immediately.
We will start with the first one
and we'll finish with the two hundredth one.
So could they actually succeed?
Until they try it's impossible to tell,
but other scientists have already tried to clone our close relatives -
Rhesus monkeys.
So far from more than a thousand attempts to clone a monkey from an adult cell,
not a single one has succeeded.
The DNA has so fragmented that no cloned embryo has yet survived,
but some believe it's only a matter of time
before these hurdles are overcome
and that progress towards human cloning is inevitable.
First there will be a refinement of the technologies
that are being applied to sheep and cattle and mice.
There will be clonings that occur in dogs and cats
and they will be reliable enough
that actually people will be interested in cloning their own pets.
There will be clonings that occur in Rhesus monkeys
that will demonstrate these procedures are feasible in primates
and at that point the risks will be sufficiently reduced
that some group like the Zavoses and Antinoris of the worid
will leap in and attempt and actually succeed at doing a human cloning.
And as the drive towards cloning continues
more and more people are drawn to seek this new way to change their lives.
I think I would say walk in our shoes.
For one week walk in our shoes and then, and then judge, you know.
Be, be in our situation and then judge us
and I can guarantee you they will have a different judgement.
The reason why I condemn you
is for the same reason that virtually all responsible real scientists
who publish real information
condemns what you are doing and criticises what you're doing...
For now, mainstream science, politicians and public opinion
believe that cloning humans would be courting disaster.
...the reason why you should not be cloning is because it's dangerous,
because it's unnecessary
and because actually it is damaging our respect for human life
and the dignity of human beings
and you should be ashamed of what you are doing.
But the momentum towards cloning may be unstoppable.
We either do it right, ladies and gentlemen,
or we don't do it
and those incidentally that wish to ban this technology,
and I said this to the US Congress and I will say that to you tonight,
they are not going to be the Neil Armstrongs that would fly, that would fly us to the Moon
and walk us on it,
therefore we need to be courageous,
we need to move forward
and we need to develop this technology in a safe, responsible fashion
and I think it is the right thing to do
and we intend to do that.
Thank you.
Downloaded From www.AllSubs.org