What savagery, and all over a dead sheep. It is a decade since Dolly, the world’s first cloned sheep, was born and more than three years since she shuffled off her genetically modified coil, but if anything the controversy is livening up. Paternity suits have flown in an attempt to discover who is, intellectually speaking, the daddy of Dolly: a bruising legal action has provoked bleatings that Ian Wilmut, who led the pioneering flock of scientists, could even be shorn of an international prize awarded when Dolly-mania swept the world.
Also this year, another poor lamb — a leading cloning expert and Wilmut collaborator — was roasted amid accusations that he is, well, the black sheep of the cloning world. Oh, and while Wilmut basks in Dolly’s posthumous celebrity he raises the spectre of cloning being used to tackle psychological disorders and maybe — just maybe — low intelligence.
Meanwhile, the science gambols swiftly on. As Britain chewed over Dollygate scandals, South Korea cloned the first dog. An American lab promises to clone your cat for £17,000. And Wilmut scares the horses by talking about “boutique babies”, whereby parents tick a computer menu of desired qualities for their sprog.
Spooky stuff, but Wilmut hardly looks like Frankenstein. Well fed, with a cheery manner that distracts attention from his hands — they shake as the questions grow harder — he looks as threatening as the proverbial dead sheep. Not that a former Wilmut underling would agree: at an employment tribunal in March, Dr Prim Singh, a molecular biologist, claimed racial discrimination and bullying against “grumpy” Wilmut and Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute.
Other scientists then downed Bunsen burners to insist Wilmut had hogged too much credit for Dolly: rock music is littered with vicious fights over “artistic differences”, but they are positively decorous compared to scientific spats.
Thankfully, Wilmut’s alleged grumpiness is not visible as he pads round his swish new Edinburgh research centre. A man’s affection for sheep might be the one love that still dare not speak its name, yet Wilmut amusingly recalls life with Dolly: “She posed for People magazine, became a cover girl and caught the eye of Bill Clinton. Even when she had six offspring she continued to make headlines.”
Far from looking back on Dollymania as OTT, Wilmut says we are blasé: “We should still be surprised it works at all.” The nucleus of a sheep’s cell was transplanted into the egg cell — smaller than the tip of a sewing needle — from a second sheep, then inserted into the uterus of a third sheep. In a combination of high science and low humour the product was named Dolly, after the ample-chested country singer Dolly Parton. Well, the process did start from a mammary cell.
But a bad joke has led to serious possibilities: despite always opposing human cloning, Wilmut now suggests embryos could be cloned and their genes altered, allowing babies to be created without debilitating conditions. Scientists have been busy attempting to “wash” embryos of motor neurone and Huntington’s disease.
“You can,” Wilmut enthuses, “change precisely the functioning of any gene in an animal.” But he cautions: “To make it routine we need another advance on a par with that which created Dolly.” Currently scientists are, if you will forgive the vulgarity, firing too many blanks.
Although embryos used for experimentation have no prospect of becoming human — they are “leftovers” from IVF treatments — their use presents ethical dilemmas. Wilmut admits even his own wife, a church elder, does not “entirely agree” with aspects of his work.
“We shouldn’t be so frightened of these technologies,” he insists. “If you could use it to prevent inheritance of genetic abnormalities which cause a disease, I would find that ethically acceptable. Indeed,” he considers, “you could argue it would be immoral not to.”
Perhaps, but doubters say we will soon slide down some very slippery slopes. How far should we go? “To make a genetically identical twin is not fair on that new person: we would expect them to be identical, but they wouldn’t be. Even genetically identical twins are not entirely the same. David Beckham’s son will be expected to be a footballer, though curiously not a singer like his mother; and if you have a genetically similar twin the expectation of similarity is even greater.” And that expectation is unfair.
This, he says, is why pet owners will be disappointed if they send beloved moggies in picnic coolers to be replaced by an identical pet. “People are being misled: a pet’s personality will be different.”
Wilmut’s objection to cloning people seems a curiously technical one, however. Surely the real problem is that it contradicts the dictum of Kant, the German philosopher, who warned: never use a person as a means, always an end.
We move to the thorny area of what conditions might be treated. Low intelligence? “Complex things like intelligence will be influenced by many genes, which will influence different things.” So if you stop aggression, which is bad, it might also stop competitiveness, which is useful. But if you could cure someone of being deaf, why not of being dumb?
“It would have to be a disease due to one gene.” But if you tackle physical diseases why not — if science could make it possible — moral diseases such as meanness? “I think it is important to accept our children as they are,” Wilmut bats back. “People have inherited motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis, Huntington’s disease: it would be reasonable to prevent the birth of such children with that disadvantage.” And to be clear: it would be the same person born in all respects, but simply cured of the disease.
Considering the strong correlation between high intelligence and quality of life, however, might the time come when it seems elitist to deny extra IQ to the great unwise? “I can’t envisage a time when we understand enough to confidently make the change.” But here comes Wilmut’s massive “but”: “If in the future people were confident enough I think it would deserve serious consideration.”
More immediately Wilmut is confident scientists can use cloning to tackle schizophrenia: “This is being studied by colleagues here in Edinburgh. My family sadly carries breast cancer and I carry a mutation,” says Wilmut, 62. “You need to be able to identify the cell that if it had been in a woman’s breast would have been likely to carry cancer.”
However, cloned animals tend to be unhealthy due to errors in the production of the cells: Dolly grew obese and snuffed it. “So the first question we have to ask is: ‘Do the abnormalities introduced in cloning mask differences which are due to the disease?’ That will take five years, by which time I will be approaching retirement. But if I can act as a catalyst I will be very pleased.”
We discuss designer babies, poignantly, just yards from where Gordon and Sarah Brown opened a unit in honour of their tragic first baby. Even without cloning, children are “designed” in the way that pushy parents direct them towards certain activities: “I have children and grandchildren. I plead guilty to the charge and occasionally apologise.”
Wilmut discloses that an international group will launch later this summer, setting out ethical rules for those who are big in cloning, but he admits that, as knowledge mutates, it is possible rogue labs will plumb moral depths and attempt to fashion designer babies.
“You have to ask whether this technology will be useful,” he contends “and maybe you have to take the risk that it might be misused. We got here today using transport and a minority are killed that way, but we still use transport.” He draws a parallel with IVF treatment: hugely controversial at first, it then became accepted and finally taken for granted.
Still, the frightening prospect of all embryos being scanned and shorn of “defects” will, he suggests, always remain science fiction, for one fine reason: “The old-fashioned way of making babies is much more fun.”
It frustrates him we do not celebrate scientific advance more: “My father was a diabetic dependent on insulin, which was discovered just in time: if he had been born 20 years earlier he would not have survived and I would not have been born.”
But with every advance there are setbacks. Work in Dr Woo-suk Hwang’s South Korean lab with which he was collaborating is now in tatters: “You have to feel very sorry for patients, because we were aware he oversold his technology. I have heard him promise people in wheelchairs they will walk again. There is a simple biological reason that makes [repair] unlikely: you have to do it very early, so if the person is already in a wheelchair it is probably too late.” Some might say Wilmut should have blown the whistle.
“I visited three times; he was very convincing. Remember, fraud is not limited to this field. There were reports about a Norwegian scientist making up results in relation to cancer. It is not even the first time it has happened in cloning.”
Why? Are scientists as prone to cheat as diving footballers? “I am sure scientists are just like anyone else. He must have believed by the time people questioned the work he’d have found a method that was successful.”
Wilmut has attracted his own controversy. In retrospect, should he have made it clearer that Dolly was, in every sense, the product of many different labours? “We have now done two books describing events as they were, giving everybody credit,” he says crisply.
But the principal scientist, Keith Campbell, stopped working with Wilmut shortly after the paper was published and a technician, Bill Ritchie, still has the hump. And what of the little chappy who found him a grump? “I think it is an outcome from human nature,” he says cautiously. “These things become amplified when you have an achievement and people are in the public eye.” Hmm.
So where do we go from here? “We all came from a single cell smaller than a grain of sand. Almost all our cells have the same genetic information. We used to think the mechanisms that produce those different cells from that one starting cell couldn’t be changed. Dolly showed us they can. I believe one day we will be able to change the functioning of cells without having to make an embryo.”
Which would, of course, take away the objections. “That’s right. If you have someone with Parkinson’s disease it may be possible for a clinician to take bone marrow and treat them with knowledge from cloning so they go back to an earlier stage of development, re-forming the missing nerve cells. They wouldn’t have to use drugs,” he continues, gazing into the distance. “It is,” he concludes, “just about people thinking differently.”
It is important not to follow scientists like sheep. It is, after all, a little glib for Wilmut to say we shouldn’t bleat about rogue labs when anything they produce will, in some sense, be the monster of his creation. But is Wilmut really Frankenstein? Far from fearing Dolly the dead sheep, on the 10th anniversary of her birth, perhaps we should finally learn to love her.
After Dolly: The Uses and Misuses of Human Cloning by Ian Wilmut and Roger Highfield is published by Little, Brown on Thursday
