Jim Bittermann: The possibility of cloning a human

Jim Bittermannn is CNN's senior European correspondent.

Q: How do doctors propose to do this cloning procedure, and what is its intended purpose?

Bittermann: Basically what the doctors here say is that they want to help couples who would like to have children to have children. That is one of the reasons why they have received so many hundreds of volunteers from all over the world who'd like to take part in these experiments. What they are not saying is that in fact cloning is an extremely complicated affair, and in the case of the animals that have been cloned like the sheep for instance, there have been hundreds of miscues of mistakes where a fully formed being is not created at the end of the process.

MESSAGE BOARD Human cloning    QUICK VOTE Do you support scientists' plans to clone a human being? Yes No View Results     AUDIO Arthur Caplan, Univ. of Pennsylvania: It's clearly amoral 852K/79 sec. AIFF or WAV sound    IN-DEPTH CNN explores the blueprint of the body:   • Overview   • Genome guide   • Glossary   • Genetics FAQ    ALSO Pope condemns human cloning Making a production over reproduction From TIME: Baby it's you! And you, and you.

With Dolly for instance -- the first cloned sheep -- there were 277 tries before a sheep came out that was not malformed. And what each one of those tries means is that an egg has to be implanted into a mother and the mother then has to take the egg through the birth process. In the case of human beings, it would mean that you would have to have a lot of surrogate mothers who would be willing to allow themselves to be used for nine months with the possibility -- in fact, the way it looks according to scientists now the very real possibility -- that the baby would be born deformed.

Q: How do these scientists and doctors respond to that concern?

Bittermann: Well, these particular doctors, who are, I should say, fertility experts more than real cloning researchers, respond by saying that have confidence and they know what they are doing and they will take care of all of these technical problems.

Q: Who are the proponents for this kind of procedure, and who are the main groups who are opposed to this kind of thing?

Bittermann: Well, I think a lot of mainstream scientists are against the experimenting in the human cloning area before a lot more is known about cloning and how it should work. The two people are the main drivers behind the announcements in the news Friday are a gentlemen from Kentucky who is a fertility expert who works mainly with animals, as I understand it, and a scientists who has been reprimanded by the Italian medical community for his fertility work in the past. That man is Severino Antinori who seven years ago implanted an egg into a 62 year old woman, permitting her to give birth. There was a great deal of controversy about that at the time. He was later reprimanded by the Italian medical community for that.

Q: What are the possible scientific uses of cloning aside from the one purpose that you mentioned of fertility and people being able to give birth who otherwise wouldn't be able to?

Bittermann: There are some rather science fiction kind of scenarios that can be painted by scientists where you might, for instance, grow organs on animals so that you would have replacement organs. In terms of human cloning, it is mainly a sociological issue where you would want to replace a lost relative or something like that. But the scientists stress of course that when you clone a person you end up with perhaps a physical duplicate, but you don't have anything like a psychological duplicate or mental duplicate of the person that is cloned. All that depends on experience and knowledge and all the rest of it. So you may be able to duplicate the physical exterior of a person, but you wouldn't be able to duplicate the person. There are lot of people who don't believe that any work in cloning of human beings is needed at all -- that there is no purpose to it, that there really no reason to do it and that there is no reason to create human beings in a petrie dish when there are other means.

Q: Well when does this group plan to begin their experiment?

Bittermann: They are not saying when they will begin their experiments and there are number of scientists, mainstream scientists, who doubt that this is going to take place.

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Embryo cloning faces court challenge
January 26, 2001
Green light for embryo cloning
January 22, 2001
Scientists await birth of first cloned endangered species
January 5, 2001
Archbishop condemns embryo research
December 20, 2000
Cloning man's best friend
December 11, 2000
From TIME: Baby it's you! And you, and you
From TIME: Copycat, copydog
From TIME: My sister, my clone

Executive Summary -- Cloning Human Beings
Roslin Institute Online: Information
HFEA

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