From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein through Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and on to Ira Levin's Boys From Brazil there has always been a morbid fascination with the thought of mankind "creating" human life by way of processes other than those of sexual procreation. Predictably, with the news released this week from Edinburgh there has been another flurry of that fascination, most of it largely irrelevant to what has been achieved by scientists at the Roslin Institute working with the biotechnology company PPL Therapeutics.
The significance of what Dr Ian Wilmut and his colleagues have done cannot be gainsaid, but it has very little to do with some of the vistas conjured in the media this week of despots having themselves cloned to perpetuate their rule, of parents having a dying child cloned to ease their bereavement, of an adult daughter seeking to have her dead father returned by way of cloning, and more even more fanciful. While a small number of science fiction works$ have proved prophetic, most have not, and many have titillated irrational fears rather than educated interested readers. There has already been too much science fiction woven around Dr Wilmut's scientifically rational and utterly non-fictional work.
The cloning of animals and plants is neither new nor common. What is novel about the Edinburgh work is that, for the first time, a mammal has been cloned successfully from an adult Dolly, a seven-week-old lamb has been cloned from a six-year-old female sheep through a process of implanting genetic material from that sheep's udder into an emptied egg-cell which was then gestated in the womb of a "surrogate" ewe, delivered successfully and shown to be genetically identical to its mother. This is, of itself, a significant scientific achievement for which the researchers deserve credit. But it does not signal any apocalypse tomorrow.
It does, however, serve as a reminder that there is still need for scientists, ethicists and others to consider, with a sharper focus than has hitherto been evident, the many issues that may arise from this kind of genetic manipulation and to seek some consensus on answers to the many questions that can be posed. Some of the more technical answers may come from Dolly herself. Are the genes upon which her being is based already damaged by the age and environmental exposure of her "mother"? Is Dolly likely to be fertile? Is she more or less likely than another sheep to be susceptible to disease? And so on.
Other questions are broader. Some therapeutic substances have been produced in sheep which may be of value in treating human diseases such as haemophilia and cystic fibrosis. Would a reliable ability to clone the relevant sheep prove more or less useful in this regard? Would widespread cloning of domestic animals reduce genetic diversity to the point at which future necessary evolutionary changes could be less likely to occur? What ethical guidelines should govern any kind of production-line cloning if the Roslin techniques prove safe, effective and readily repeatable?
After these and many more questions have been answered and some general consensus achieved, then the much more fanciful and still fictional idea of human cloning might be addressed. But that is still some considerable way into the future and, for what it is worth, there appears to be a majority of scientists who believe that attempts at human cloning should be prohibited anyway.