Hello Dolly, hello Dolly, goodbye the stuff of sci-fi

Would you give Diana, Princess of Wales, a second chance at life? Knowing what we do about her unhappy life, would you parent a baby Diana and offer her so much support and confidence that the best would surface and she would be happy?

Dr Richard Seed's plans for genetic piracy make such a prospect possible. A Chicago-based physicist, he has vowed to clone a human within two years. He knows people will object, but as soon as they see "a happy, bouncing, baby clone", their opposition will turn to soppy, goo-goo smiles. No problem.

Leading scientists are already disowning him and calling for their colleagues to support President Clinton's five-year voluntary moratorium on human cloning in non-federally funded agencies. Like the EU, the US government has been caught on the hop, with cloning and patenting legislation still at discussion stage.

Huge companies like Smith Kline Beecham are lobbying the EU for the licensing of patents covering particular human genetic sequences. Given that the EU's current draft directive seems to interpret the idea of patenting much the same for living beings as it does for mechanical and industrial inventions, the biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies may be on to a winner.

Whatever happens, Dr Seed won't be stopped. His constitutional entitlement to liberty entitles him to carry out whatever research he wants, or so he argues. If he can't do it in Chicago, he'll do it in Tijuana.

Cloning was the stuff of sci-fi until Dr Ian Wilmut and his team at Edinburgh's Roslin Institute made Dolly the sheep, swiftly followed by a growing herd of sistermothers whose milk includes an anti-coagulant with huge positive implications for conditions such as haemophilia.

Monkeys had been cloned from embryonic cells at Oregon's Regional Primate Centre, but this was different. Dolly's DNA came from mammary gland somatic tissue: Wilmut's breakthrough was to clone a large mammal from an adult of the same species, thus proving that cells could be re turned, as it were, to an undifferentiated state.

The research cost a fortune. It took 277 other mis-sheep before Dolly became a live lamb, but a biotechnology company, PPL Therapeutics, helped pay the bills.

Even the most scientifically illiterate of us can figure out that what you can do with sheep, you can do with humans. That's where Dr Seed steps in. After failing in the early 1980s to commercialise a treatment known as fertilised embryo transfer, he stakes his claim to history by offering infertile people the chance - for $1 million - to create a chip off the old block.

Survival of the richest? Life finally becomes an economic commodity, and people do, too. If you've got the dosh, you've got the right to make a life or part of it on your own terms. Women could reproduce without men, researchers could pay to clone their favourite human subjects, those with special traits could in theory make a fortune by selling their unusual genomes. And that's for starters.

Cloning can't breed in or out particular characteristics: that is the business of germline gene therapy. Dr Seed hasn't mentioned that so far, but it's a short hop to making it theoretically possible to include desirable traits. Who could oppose the cloning out of fatally inherited diseases or regulating the inclusion of specific genes for intelligence, personality or physical propensities?

Human cloning tests human civilisation like no other issue before. Dr Seed puts it succinctly: "Cloning and the reprogramming of DNA is the first serious step in becoming one with God."

God and science have never been bedfellows, at least not for a very long time. Even Darwin's Origin Of The Species predicated the hypothesis that natural selection operated within a given environment, not as a goal or end set by either God or nature.

If science has a god, it is the phenomenon of the value-free fact, a divorce between what ethics calls the "is" and the "ought".

The value-free fact is to science what celibacy is to Roman Catholicism: a way of letting you concentrate without distractions. Ethics is excluded from the core curriculum of science students, just as science doesn't feature in the fundamentals of ethical training. How can they hope to have any dialogue at all?

Dr Seed claims to target infertile people, but if profit is the bottom line, why say No to a fertile person who prefers to commission his or her own clone or who chooses someone else's DNA? Wanting a clone and wanting a child are not identical: will a lifelong commitment to parenting the clone become non-negotiable?

Cloning is a radical shift in our vision of humanity and how it is constituted, but it is also the most alluring prospect we've faced so far. You need only a few drops of blood, for example, to extract DNA and, with extraction techniques improving all the time, the probability of extracting relevant genetic sequences from the dead increases every day.

What scares us is the thought of cloning Hitlers, Saddam Husseins, Ayatollah Khomeinis. But imagine cloning a Gigli, a Picasso, a Mother Teresa. (Seed reportedly wished he had thought of asking her for a sample before she died.)

LET'S return to those 227 mis-sheep before Dolly. The average take-home baby rate from in-vitro treatments varies from 9 per cent to 16 per cent, so it is reasonable to speculate that cloned babies might have a lower rate of survival. If the foetuses survived to, say, 28 weeks, their organs could be viable and, if viable, they could offer another source of profit.

Producing human organs as a transplant resource is a long-term goal of many researchers, but experimentation is difficult and potentially harrowing. A headless frog embryo has been produced, yet finding a way to grow live organs without surrounding them in a human body has so far proved impossible.

Seed's devil-may-care attitude to human cloning and its failure rate could pave the way. If cloned bodies are kept functioning artificially, the organs can grow in situ. Coma victims are kept alive and relatively healthy for years, so why not cloned rejects?

Enter big business. Seed's announcement of his intentions could be a sign that he is prepared to take the professional risks which are an inevitable part of cloning human organs. If that is so, funding will probably flow to his agency, no matter what legal regulations are introduced.

Health is now wealth in a sense never before possible, in that people will go to almost any lengths to stay alive or to develop their quality of life. An increasingly ageing population in the US in particular seems to be rejecting the whole idea that death should have dominion over them. If babies are set to become a commodity, why not body parts, too?

If humanity is viewed as a potential economic instrument, as an aggregate of bio-processes which can be harvested and exploited, then cloning could make monkeys of us all.