Do You Know the Mutton Man?

For many years a team of researchers led by Esmail Zanjani at the University of Nevada at Reno have been trying to grow ‘humanized sheep’. Their goal is to create sheep that have organs such as the liver that could be transplanted into humans without being rejected.

To get xenograftable organs the scientists inject extracts stem cells from adult bone marrow into a sheep fetus while it is still in the womb. These cells are integrated into the developing fetus. Zanjani’s team has announced it has now made a sheep with roughly fifteen percent human cells. The sheep have a much higher percentage in their livers.

The goal of this form of genetic engineering is laudable. Produce transplantable organs. But the ethical objections are likely to be loud and heated.

The creation of chimeras is not something that has received sufficient attention and public debate. Groups sponsored by the European Union and the President’s Council on Bioethics have taken a look but the public is still not really tracking this issue.

Some animal rights activists are not going to like the idea of creating animals to harvest their parts. Some are going to find the risks associated with carrying animal viruses into humans ethically daunting. And many are going to give ‘mutton men’ are very high score on the ‘yuk’ scale.

Making animal/human hybrids makes sense. But, in this case those with ethical concerns are right. We need some international standards in place before ‘lambination’ becomes a standard part of transplantation.
-Art Caplan

Will Human Clones Have Souls?

Esquire asks the question, "would a cloned human being have a soul?", as part of its "Answer Fella" series, which I mention as though I've ever heard of it, which I haven't. The question comes right before another about what it means to call "the badlands" badlands, and in both cases the correct answer is, "shut up."

But ever-patient, our Dr. Caplan - who will be celebrated tomorrow at Benjamin Franklin's 301st Birthday Party as recipient of the Franklin Founder Award - offers the answer Ben would have given, though Ben wouldn't have allowed a column as dumb as Answer Fella to exist in the first place.

It's kinda funny though:

Would a cloned human being have a soul?
It wasn't widely reported, but when Dolly the sheep—the first mammal cloned from an adult cell—died in 2003, she was listening to Barry White's 1974 smash album Can't Get Enough and pregnant by a Bolivian alpaca doing a long stretch at Edinburgh's Royal Zoo for running cocaine. Sure, the vets gave her the lethal injection, but the real cause of death was a broken heart. Now if a freaking cloned sheep had such a vast spirit, you can bet that a cloned human would be imbued with the same immaterial presence that binds us all, even Antonin Scalia, to the Godhead. But don't just take AF's word for it. C. Ben Mitchell, director of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, says, "The answer is in the question itself. A cloned human being would in fact be a person and would therefore be ensouled. To be human is to be a person is to be a soul." This is neither an argument in favor of human cloning nor the final answer to various theological questions about the existence or nature of a human soul, topics best left to mouthbreathing Pentecostals, infallible men in funny hats, and Mitch Albom. It is simply to say, as Arthur Caplan, chairman of the Department of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania does, "If humans have souls, then clones will have them, too."

The end.

Dolly on the Dinner Table? Don't Worry About It

Art Caplan writes in his MSNBC column:

Dolly, the world's first cloned mammal, must be turning in her grave.

The Food and Drug Administration has declared that meat and milk from cloned animals is safe to eat, paving the way for cloned products to show up in grocery stores across the land, likely without any special labels or warnings. This makes sense because there is absolutely no evidence to show that there is anything unsafe about milk or meat from cloned cows, goats or pigs. (Actually, the FDA is holding off on deciding whether cloned sheep are a safe source of chops, saying not enough information is available yet.) But many of us hear the words "meat from cloned animals" and get queasy. Dolly, fairly or not, is to blame.

Dolly was a sweet-faced little sheep who bothered no one during her life. Her only impact on humanity was to give employment to countless novelists, journalists, TV producers, cult leaders, Hollywood screenwriters, politicians, comedians and, yes, bioethicists, who otherwise might have spent years wondering what they could do that would scare the daylights out of the American public while making either making them plenty of money or getting them elected in the case of the politicians. Remember Osama bin Laden and avian flu weren't in the news when Dolly's existence was announced to a completely freaked-out public in 1997.

Dolly, whose remains are on display at the Royal Museum of Scotland, spent her six years on earth as the object of scorn, fear, derision and slander. The media had a field day upon her birth telling us that Dolly was the key to resurrecting the dead, creating vicious clone armies and a world in which everyone would be trailed by a hapless clone whose internal organs would be available on demand to prolong lives threatened by disease or old age. Who could like a cloned animal when the technology that created her might lead to innumerable copies of Kevin Federline, Bob Saget or Nicole Richie?

But worse was to follow. Soon wacky cults like the Raelians and nutty scientists and semi-scientists like the incredibly fortuitously named Dr. Richard Seed and the ominously monikered Professor Panos Zavos were hollering about cloning rich people, cult leaders, and generally unsavory types to the rapt and stupefied attention of a media unable to discern the fact that dressing in a Star Trek uniform and displaying a very bad hair dye job did not prove your bona fides as the cloner most to be feared.

All of this nonsense set the stage for the next big scare about cloning, which was fueled by the debate over federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Opponents of that funding found they got the greatest traction for their desire not to see federal funds spent by invoking the word "clone" over and over again. Funding embryonic stem cell research likely meant a pod person would move in next door, some high-profile Republican legislators as well as President Bush would lead you to believe.

All of this nonsense took a toll. It made Americans forget that cloning is nothing more than artificially creating twins. It made us forget that every drop of wine we drink comes from cloned grapes. It made us ignore the fact that if you want to worry about what you are eating you would be better off fretting over whether the FDA has enough inspectors on the job at meat plants looking for salmonella and E. coli than whether your dinner started off as a clone. Dolly got a bad rap. And it has stuck. But the FDA is right to follow the evidence and let products from clones enter the marketplace.

If people want these products labeled so they can choose not to buy them, that's their right. But, before you decide, remember the only thing you really have to fear from cloned animals is what human beings have done to ruin their reputations!

-Art Caplan

Cloning Humans to Harvest Stem Cells

National Public Radio's Jennifer Luden speaks with NPR's Joe Palca about recent advances in the field of cloning, and talks about why bans on human cloning have not been enacted. -- Linda Glenn

Magnus Takes on Kitty Cloning

The Detroit Free Press reported that the first cloned-to-order pet, a kitten named Little Nicky, was delivered to a Texas woman about 2 weeks ago. The kitten, was cloned by a Sausolito company called Genetic Savings and Clone, for a mere $50,000. Little Nicky's owner had banked her deceased 17-year-old cat's DNA, which was used to create the clone. David Magnus was quoted: "It's morally problematic and a little reprehensible...For $50,000, she could have provided homes for a lot of strays." - Linda Glenn

"A Number" - A Preview

We blogged the NY premier of this great new play about cloning. Now Religion and News Weekly reports on it, including an interview with Caplan and others who had a chance to see the press-night preview. [Link]

African Cloning and African Bioethics

Mathaba.Net News publishes the African Union News treatise on the "issue of human cloning within the overall context of a bioethics program: priorities and perspectives for africa," a piece contributed to the Africa-Europe Troika Meeting in November of this year. It is a very interesting description of foundations for an African bioethics and puts many of the current debates elsewhere about cloning into context.

At Last the Cloning Play: A Number

The New York Times discusses the soon-to-open-in-New-York play A Number, in which cloning is a critical thread. In focus is the playright and her fascinating and somewhat apolitical approach to the subject matter. We cannot wait to see this play. Tickets are not on sale at the New York Theater Worshop, which doesn't appear though to sell them online.

Headless Clones Rear Their Ugly ... Shoulders?

Indo-Asian News Service is reporting that P.B. Desai of the Mumbai-based Tata Memorial Center (India) has argued that the development of the headless, cloned mouse model will make it ever-more likely that there will be headless human organ farms. No data to report, just good old speculation and hype. Somebody better let National Enquirer know about this one.

Vatican Backs Total Cloning Ban Including for Stem Cells

No surprise here, although it still remains to be explained how Catholics arrive at the notion that a nuclear transfer derived colony of cells with no potential for birth can be called an embryo. More in Catholic News.

UN Cloning Situation UPDATED

Leave it to the Christian Science Monitor to produce the first thoughtful description of the current state of the UN debate concerning the several versions of proposed international bans on several kinds of cloning technologies. UPDATE: The vote has stalled again as New Scientist reports in this great piece.

StemClone Digest

Just brought to our attention, but unread as of yet: StemClone Digest is an online journal on that set of issues.

Constitutional Cloning Take 2- Wesley Smith & Brian Alexander

A couple of days ago we found Brian Alexander's Times magazine piece on the First Amendment and rights to research, specifically rights to clone. Brian commented that we were a bit too harsh. Now Wesley Smith comes to the debate with a quickly penned response to Alexander in the Weekly Standard. If you are scratching your head about the comments by Leon Kass in the Alexander essay, to the effect that Kass would "rather not think about" the constitutionality question, don't despair. Smith is only too happy to clarify the evils of a 1st Amendment argument. This is truly new territory for the neocon bioethics crowd - kind of like their adventure in human nature theory - and it makes for great reading.

UPDATE: NYT on Cloning and First Amendment

Brian Alexander, one of the best of the "bioethics essayists" to emerge in the past five years, helps the Times' Magazine make a first foray by a newspaper into one of the more interesting questions concerning current and pending laws governing both cloning and embryo research: could they survive an appellate court review? Is it unconstitutional (or wrong) to restrict scientific experimentation on the grounds that such a restriction violates freedom of expression? Brian quotes Robertson, Kass and Sunstein on the analogy between experimentation and reporting. Brian tells us the Times' editors cut his interview with Lori Andrews on her great work on the specific issue of the constitutionality of cloning per se. I wondered about why the piece didn't mention the important FDA policy prohibiting cloning that aims at gestation; Brian says the editors cut that too.