Book: The Second Creation
Authors: Andrew P Read
Journal: BMJ (2000)

Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell, Colin Tudge


Headline Books, £12.99, pp 362 




ISBN 0747275300

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Rating: ★★

I found the media reaction to Dolly the sheep decidedly depressing. As a publicly funded scientist in a democratic society, I acknowledge my obligation to explain what I am doing. If I worked on quarks or black holes—things far beyond normal human experience—I would expect some odd comments about my work. But surely not clones? Everybody knows a human clone. Half a million walk the streets of Britain. Yet, despite our everyday familiarity with them, popular culture persists in seeing clones as some sort of semi-human programmable zombies. After all the hype, we need to get back down to earth. In this book the science writer Colin Tudge joins Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell in a careful explanation of how Dolly was cloned, why she was cloned, and what it might mean.

The authors work hard at stripping away the hype—so hard that they risk stripping away the interest as well. After the witty pastiche of Leonardo da Vinci on the dust jacket, I struggled through pedestrian expositions of basic genetics and cell biology. One of those adult cartoon books would have put it over so much better. However, when the story moves on to the cloned sheep—Megan and Morag cloned from fetal cells, Dolly cloned from an adult mammary cell, and her successor, Polly, cloned from a genetically engineered fetal fibroblast—the pace and interest pick up. The authors have good fun at the expense of journalists who wrote stuff like: “when you do something to anger her, she looks at you with those intense red eyes—eyes full of hate.” Once again, as in every public pronouncement from Wilmut et al, they stress their opposition to human reproductive cloning. One thing I learnt from the book is that Dolly, as an expression of remarkable mammary potential, was named after Ms D Parton. This raises the question, what will the first animals cloned from spleen or colon cells be called? I think we should be told.

Why is Dolly important? We don't need fancy technology to make lots of sheep—this weekend the Lake District was full of frisking lambs, all strictly organic. Dolly refuted the common belief that adult cells are irreversibly programmed. Technically, she points the way to genetic engineering of animals. “Pharming”—making animals that produce valuable proteins in, say, their milk—becomes much more controllable if they can be cloned from cells manipulated in vitro. Dolly was the only success out of 277 attempts, and some cloned animals have unexplained abnormalities, so the technology still has some way to go. But now we know it can be done the problems will surely be solved.

As for human cloning, no doubt somewhere in the poorly regulated US commercial sector, laboratories are already working to give spurious immortality to some self obsessed billionaire. Sooner or later they will succeed. So what? I pity the clone, but no more than I pity any child of ambitious parents who think they can programme its life. Actually, the clone might well have the last laugh. Suppose he did resemble his self centred progenitor. Would he meekly follow a predetermined blueprint for his life? Surely he would turn on his programmers with intense red eyes, full of hate?