Today in Technology History
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February 24
The world’s newspapers first reported the story of Dolly, the cloned sheep, exactly six years ago.
Dolly was the world’s first cloned mammal, created in 1996 by researchers at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland. The technique used to manufacture Dolly worked like this: a cell nucleus was removed from an udder cell of an adult sheep. That nucleus, carrying the adult sheep’s genetic material, was inserted into a sheep egg cell that had its own nucleus removed. That egg cell developed into an embryo that eventually became a sheep genetically identical (essentially) to the original adult sheep. This method was tried hundreds of times before the scientists succeeded in creating a successful pregnancy. When Dolly was almost eight months old, her existence was revealed to the press, and newspapers carried the story the next day, on February 24, 1997.
As you may have heard, Dolly died ten days ago. She had a number of health problems, including arthritis in unusual locations, and she was euthanized because of a serious lung disease. There have also been indications that some of Dolly’s cells may have been prematurely aging. No one is sure whether these problems are connected to the fact that Dolly was created through cloning, but many scientists and critics have argued that the risk of health problems is so serious that cloning should not be attempted on humans.
But even if cloning were perfectly safe and we could manufacture healthy human clones as easily as we make hamburgers, there would still be many ethical reasons not to clone humans. Human cloning would place an enormous burden on the cloned children. Human cloning would give too much power to one generation to shape the next generation. And human cloning would open the door for many other techniques -- such as the ability to create "designer babies" -- that will ultimately diminish our respect for human life.
It is possible that the first cloned human children will be born this year -- although, if you believe the claims of the Raelian cult, the first baby clones already exist. We are at a great crossroads in history when, for the first time, our technologies may fundamentally alter what it means to be human. So much depends upon our ability to choose wisely.
Related links:
This report, "Human Cloning and Human Dignity," is a thoughtful and thorough consideration of the issues involved in human cloning. The report was released last year by the U.S. President's Council on Bioethics.
Click here to read about the death of Dolly.
Click here to read about Dolly’s unusual arthritis.
Click here to visit the homepage of the Roslin Institute.
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