AFTER DOLLY The Uses and Misuses of Human Cloning
by Ian Wilmut and Roger Highfield
Little, Brown, £12.99; 336pp

ALMOST EVERY BIG scientific advance has a back story. Few spring direct from darkness into light, but rather they stumble from a shadowy prehistory of prediction, boasting and pulp fiction. One might almost claim that by the time a discovery is in the pages of Nature, it has spent years on the airport bookstalls between soft covers.

So it was with Dolly, the first cloned mammal. She was a sheep, but by the time she was born, clones had a long human history behind them.

In His Image, a 1978 bestseller, purported to be the true tale of a millionaire wishing to clone an heir. In the same year The Boys from Brazil, Ira Levin’s novel peopled by Adolf Hitler clones, was made into a hugely successful film. There were even older precursors: J. B. S. Haldane’s Daedalus, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, for instance.

So Dolly was born into a world prepared for her, with attitudes formed and prejudices sharpened. She was shocking, but not a shock. Fortunately — and entirely accidentally — she was a lamb, not a rat, a mouse, or a guinea pig. In a world primed to see clones as a menace but lambs as a symbol of innocence and grace, two sentiments struggled for mastery. The trick was turned by giving Dolly a name, not a number.

Ian Wilmut, the scientist who led the research that produced Dolly, seems to believe that his work had a hard time from the press. In fact, I can hardly remember an important advance in such a potentially tricky area of science that was so well received. If he had developed genetically modified foods, or tried to defend the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, he would know what a bad press really was.

With his collaborator Roger Highfield, Professor Wilmut has written a useful account of Dolly’s creation, and the developments in cloning and stem cell science that have followed her. He has, perforce, become something of an ethicist in the ensuing decade because nobody who has been asked as often as he has about the morality of cloning and embryo research could fail to have formed a coherent position.

His is what might be called Warnock-utilitarianism, after Mary Warnock, the architect of British legislation on IVF fertilisation, and John Stuart Mill.

He believes that embryo research is justified by its outcomes. He regards the blastocyst — the early embryo — as a thing coming into life, rather than a living thing, justifying its use in experiments designed to produce cures for disease. He draws the line firmly against reproductive cloning, and produces powerful arguments to show the folly of attempting it.

The book is chock-full of good science writing that provides an up-to-the-minute account of where we stand, including the catastrophe that has overtaken stem cell research in Korea.

There, science fact and science fiction seem to have become entwined. Woo Suk Hwang, the disgraced Korean scientist, should have known that it is in the human mind, and not the pages of a scientific journal, where that kind of confusion is permitted.

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