Maureen Freely: Cloning babies isn't creating Frankensteins

It's only in popular mythology that cloning works as eugenics. In real life, it hardly works at all

Last Friday, a flamboyant, orange-and-white-haired Frenchwoman who was once a research chemist and is now "a bishop of the Raelian sect" called a press conference in Florida to announce that she and other scientists working for Clonaid, a company owned by the sect, have just produced the first human clone.

The sect, founded five years ago by Claude Vorilhon (who is, depending on which reports you read, either a former sports journalist or a former racing-car driver), holds that all human beings descend from cloned extra-terrestrials who were deposited on Earth 25,000 years ago. The first new-generation clone, who has been codenamed Eve, was born on Boxing Day by "Caesarean section weighing seven pounds", according to Ms Boisellier, and she was "doing fine".

The bishop went on to announce that four more clones would be arriving over the next two months. She would not say where, or to whom, or under whose care these births would take place. And neither did she offer any proof to back up her claims. She did, however, promise that an independent panel of scientists would be allowed to do DNA tests in "eight or nine" days.

In the meantime, how concerned should we be? There is extreme doubt among establishment scientists that her claims are genuine. Clonaid is a newcomer to the field. It has, its mainstream competitors point out, never even cloned a mouse, but now, after implanting cloned embryos in only 10 women, it is claiming five successful pregnancies. No scientist working with other mammals can dream of such success rates.

That said, Clonaid is not the only maverick to be talking big. Severino Antinori, the controversial Italian gynaecologist, recently told the press that he was involved in caring for a woman who should be giving birth to a clone in January. And in the United States, an infertility specialist named Panos Zavos announced that he was about to implant his first cloned embryo, that he had "seven or eight" other couples "ready to go", and that he was reasonably confident he would be overseeing the birth of a clone by the end of 2003.

Like all the other pioneers in this field, he refuses to disclose where his laboratories are, saying only that they are "overseas". This is something we should all find worrying – whatever we think about cloning, and however the Clonaid and Antinori and Zavos claims pan out. Following an application made by France and Germany, the United Nations has done the groundwork for a convention that would ban reproductive human cloning worldwide. However, not all member states have been rushing to sign it.

In many countries – and the UK is one of them – reproductive cloning is already against the law, but so long as the procedure is legal in at least one country around the world, every government and professional body will find it very difficult to keep the technology from being developed further. And if the technique is pushed underground, it will become next to impossible for medical ethics committees and regulatory agencies to exert an influence over the way it develops. The cowboys will make their own rules. Their creations will live – and die – at their mercy.

If this is where we are now, or where we will find ourselves very soon, it is little wonder that we hear echoes of Dr Frankenstein and his monster. Because this is a very powerful story with deep religious roots, and because its original plot has been reshaped and rewritten in too many film studios to count, the nightmare visions that most of us have when we hear the name Frankenstein have little in common with the nightmare that first prompted Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to write her book.

So, while most people know that the original Dr Frankenstein's primary sin was to assume he could play God and create life, they forget that his creation was not born a monster. He just looked like a monster because he was ugly and deformed. Rather than merely creating him, Dr Frankenstein's bigger sin was to abandon him. It was because the world treated the creature as an outcast, and because Dr Frankenstein refused to make him a mate, that he turned into a monster of destruction.

When people say clones are potential Frankensteins, that's the sort of monster they are worried about. It is the same with the flipside nightmare – the designer baby. In both scenarios, scientifically engineered creatures take over the world, either because they are bigger and more brutish than we are, or because they are richer, smarter and more beautiful. In both cases, they are powerful because they are unnatural, and unnatural because they are powerful. You do not have to be an anthropologist to wonder how much of this fear is about reproductive science, and how much is to do with its cultural consequences.

In my view, both sets of fears are important – and it is important to consider them separately. It is, for example, important to consider how a society might change – or have to change – if children are no longer born of two parents. It would, I think, change everything, and not always for the better. But it would be ignorant and cruel to see cloned infants as members of a master race in waiting. It is only in popular mythology that cloning works as eugenics. In real life, it hardly works at all.

It took 276 failed attempts before scientists were able to bring us Dolly the sheep and, five years on, she is already suffering from arthritis. It took 9,000 cloned embryos to produce 70 or so calves, and a third of these died young. Cloned animals suffer from a high incidence of congenital malformations, physical deformities, immune-system deficiencies, obesity, pneumonia, liver deficiency and premature ageing.

While it is possible that rogue scientists working for mad prophets could be refining techniques to produce kinder results in humans, the greatest dangers in the foreseeable future will be to the clones themselves. If the first human clones look "less than human" and go on to die before they turn seven years of age, how popular is this technology likely to become? This is another question that gets lost when the Fear of Frankenstein takes over. But when you think about cloning as a practice competing in the marketplace with many others, this is the most important question of all. It is unlikely that a procedure carrying such awful risks would have widespread appeal, even among those desperate for children.

It might not even appeal to people who want to create their own twins. Contrary to popular myth, any clone you produce will not be your exact replica. Although it will have the same genetic sequence, it will develop differently – at first because of structural and metabolic differences in the egg and the differentiated cell, and later on because of all the normal environmental factors associated with living. So, you don't reproduce yourself – you just start the sequel. And if your sequel happens to be living out their life chances in a world well stocked with other sequels, he or she would be doing so in a seriously diminished gene pool.

There are serious problems around cloning as a society-wide reproductive strategy, and they are all worth knowing about, and worth discussing. But they are not going to happen tomorrow. We can take the time to separate the myths from the facts, the long-term dilemmas from the short-term emergencies.

mfreely@rosebud.u-net.com