The concept of the Reborn entered the public arena this week. "Resurrection!" says Dr Brigitte Boisselier, a research director and member of the Raelian sect in the US, who spoke to American scientists about human cloning.
Dr Boisselier thinks that once you clone humans, you'll eventually be able to insert your own memory and imagination into them so that, presto! you've got eternal life. She sat with a fertility specialist, Dr Severino Antinori, and reproductive entrepreneur Dr Panayiotis Michael Zavos, explaining to the US National Academy of Sciences why human cloning is a must. Dr Antinori said he'd help infertile couples. Ego has nothing to do with it.
Human cloning is a must not. Replication is not reproduction. Medical and scientific consensus agrees that it's too soon and too dangerous: cloned animals have much greater perinatal mortality rates, life-changing disabilities and shorter life spans.
The technology is in the hands of scientists, the issue with legislators but the key to realising it lies with individual women all over the world. Without their eggs and wombs, not even therapeutic cloning can take place. The question for women is whether they think it is in humanity's interest to develop the technologies further, or to develop them at all.
The assumption behind the current discussion is that once scientists and legislators decide how to proceed, women will oblige with eggs, wombs, and whatever else as necessary. The casual mention of using "spare" eggs from IVF treatments is just one example of how paternalistic the scientists and legislators sound already.
Women don't treat their eggs as casually as men do their sperm, or have such an endless supply. You're born with a limited number: only invasive hormonal and surgical techniques can change the balance and remove them from your ovaries.
A healthy man can donate sperm with the aid of a good imagination and a flexible wrist. A woman must ingest a cocktail of drugs, suffer the side-effects, risk hyperstimulation of her whole reproductive system and then have her eggs removed either vaginally or through surgical laparoscopy.
Many potential conflicts of interest suggest themselves. An immediate conflict emerges where a woman undergoes IVF treatment and is stimulated to produce multiple eggs. What do to with the spares? Knowing the pain of childlessness for some, a woman might allow her eggs to be donated free to another couple who were unable to produce their own. Would she as readily agree to use them for "research", and if so, who would take the financial profit?
The British Fertilisation and Human Embryology Agency is about to ban egg-sharing on ethical and financial grounds. Women were being offered reductions in the cost of fertility treatment if they agreed to assign their eggs elsewhere. Deals were, and are, being done because of a shortage of egg donors.
Some women do donate eggs: a simple Web search unearths students, single mothers or generous souls willing to offer eggs or wombs in return for "expenses". But an ageing First World population will generate huge demand for products to help combat ageing diseases, as well as those that can diminish or eliminate the effects of genetic disease on infants.
Altruism alone will not ensure sufficient supply. Are the needs of the infertile or sub-fertile to be given second place when it comes to apportioning the limited supplies of eggs and embryos to all who want to avail of their potential?
And given the known risks of hyperstimulation, how can a woman know that she will not be stimulated to produce excess eggs so as to fill a quota that her clinic may experiment with or sell on elsewhere?
WITH technology's extraordinary advances, why would a woman prefer her eggs to be used for research rather than encouraging the research itself to develop to a stage where, say, six-week-old embryos could be implanted in another woman's womb, giving the embryo a chance of life and the woman the chance of a child?
The driving force of the new reproductive technologies is fuelled partly by curiosity but largely by the vast commercial possibilities on offer. Nothing in Irish or EU law reassures people that the balance between ethics and commerce will be got right.
The EU's record on allowing the patenting of genetic sequencing to favoured biotechnology companies - a business the Irish Government is keen to encourage - offers no comfort that the results of stem-cell research or therapeutic cloning would not be similarly patented and made available to the few.
Irish law is so far behind the current debates, as Dick Ahlstrom pointed out yesterday, that Dr Antinori and his crew could legally perform cloning research in this country - provided they could get a work permit. One advisory committee is already sitting under the Department of Health, but the prospect of another being set up by the Department of Trade suggests that the Government has quickly recognised the possibilities of attracting more pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies into its bumpy labour market.
Whose eggs are they, anyway? And ought those who take the profit call the tune?
mruane@irish-times.ie