Human Cloning

The Controversies Surrounding Clonaid and Hwang Woo-suk

Jun 9, 2007 Joanne Stafferton

The history behind the race to develop a human clone, a look at the Clonaid and Hwang Woo-suk controversies and why human cloning in reality may be a bad idea.

Cloning became a reality when the world’s media reported the existence of Dolly the sheep in 1997. Scientists across the globe continued the advancement in this new field, other animals were cloned, there were also reports of scientists, despite the legal and ethical implications, attempting to clone humans.

In 1997 Clonaid, a company that billed itself as ‘the first human cloning company’ was founded by the Raelian movement, a sect that believes humans were created by extra-terrestrial beings who had mastered genetic engineering. Clonaid announced the birth of "first human clone" on December 26th 2002. The clone, whom they called Eve, was born after being created by Clonaid using a technique similar to that used to create Dolly the sheep. Clonaid announced a second birth to a Dutch lesbian woman early in January 2003 and a third to a Japanese couple plus two others in late January. All five babies were said to be healthy but there was no independent verification of Clonaid’s claims. Initially promising immediate genetic testing on Eve and others by independent scientists, Clonaid then claimed that lawsuits launched against them made testing impossible because the courts would try to identify the children and take them into care. Scepticism about Clonaid’s claims grew.

In 2004 South Korean scientist, Hwang Woo-suk claimed he had created the world’s first cloned human embryos and in 2005, he claimed that he had created stem cell lines uniquely tailored to each patient from these clones. Hwang Woo-suk published papers on this research in the prestigious journal Science and he was celebrated globally for his research, however by 2006 his results were revealed to be faked.

So as far as we know (and many people believe that the scientists working on human cloning like to keep their work a closely guarded secret), there have been no human clones. Work in this field is complicated by ethical and legal considerations, however what may be the biggest complication is the science itself, currently when other animals have been cloned most attempts fail, of those born alive about 30% of the clones are affected with "large offspring syndrome" and other debilitating conditions. Several cloned animals have died early from infections and other complications. The same problems would be expected in human cloning, raising ethical questions about whether we could accept this risk.

Sources:

Cloning fact sheet – Human Genome Project Information

Clonaid claims birth of first 5 cloned babies – Dr. Patrick Nixon

Clonaid

Who are the Raelians? – BBC News Online

Scientist's embryo cloning faked – BBC News Online

The copyright of the article Human Cloning in Genetics & Evolution is owned by Joanne Stafferton. Permission to republish Human Cloning in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.