CHICAGO SCIENTIST PLANS HUMAN CLONING

January 6, 1998

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Chicago-area scientist is poised to start experiments on cloning human beings to create babies for infertile couples, National Public Radio (NPR) reported Tuesday.

It said Richard Seed, a physicist who has done fertility research, was proposing setting up a clinic that would clone babies for would-be parents.

"It is my objective to set up a Human Clone Clinic in greater Chicago, here, make it a profitable fertility clinic and when it is profitable to duplicate it in 10 or 20 other locations around the country and maybe five or six international," Seed told NPR.

NPR said Seed had been negotiating with a Chicago area clinic, which it declined to name, that had all the equipment needed to try the procedure.

Seed could not be immediately reached for comment. NPR said Seed was working with a medical doctor who declined to be named, but who said he would not go ahead with experiments unless the American Society for Reproductive Medicine cleared it. The group currently opposes human cloning.

President Clinton has proposed banning such research for five years, saying it was morally unacceptable and could undermine society's respect for human life.

Clinton said the legislation, which would have to be passed by Congress, would not prohibit the cloning of human DNA or of animals, arguing this did not pose the same moral questions and could lead to great medical and agricultural advances.

While the legislation is pending, Clinton said the ban on using federal funds to clone humans would stay in effect and he called on the private sector to voluntarily refrain from it.

Similar reactions came from the Vatican, the European Union, and many governments.

Polls taken shortly after the announcement of the cloning of Dolly the sheep showed 90 percent of Americans opposed human cloning.

But some fertility experts say cloning offers hope and opportunities for medicine.

Britain's Lord Robert Winston, who helped pioneer test-tube fertilization, called Clinton's reaction "knee-jerk" and said the technology offered hope to many infertile couples.

Seed would have his work cut out for him. Cloning is not easy. Animals have been cloned from embryos, which is not the same as cloning an adult animal or human.

The only mammal to have been cloned from an adult is Dolly, cloned by scientists at Scotland's Roslin Institute and the associated PPL Therapeutics Inc. last year.

But Seed proposes using this same technique, which involves taking an unfertilized egg from a female, removing the nucleus, which contains most of the genetic information, and replacing it with the nucleus of an adult cell.

The hard part is tricking this egg into acting as if it has been fertilized by a sperm, thus starting it dividing as if it were a new baby, instead of just creating more skin cells or liver cells or cells of whatever organ the nucleus was taken from.

John Eppig, a developmental biologist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, said no one had done this in a human.

"If the egg is not activated with the proper signaling mechanisms, then the embryo might not reach an implantation stage, or it might not have the proper proportions of cells in order to support normal development," he told NPR.

"I would be very concerned about the health of the fetus and the health of the baby that would come from this."