Clone: The Road To Dolly, And The Path Ahead - Hardcover

Kolata, Gina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688156924 ISBN 13: 9780688156923

Publisher: William Morrow, 1997

Synopsis

The birth of Dolly -- the world's first clone -- placed in our hands the secret of creation. Few discoveries have so altered our notion of what it means to be human, or presented such a Gordian knot of ethical, spiritual, and scientific questions. Noted science journalist Gina Kolata broke the news nationally in The New York Times and was the first reporter to speak with Dr. Ian Wilmut, the embryologist who cloned Dolly. Now Kolata reveals the story behind Dolly, interweaving the social and cultural tales of our fear and fascination with cloning, reaching back nearly a century, with the riveting scientific accountof how a clone came to be and the mind-boggling questions Dolly presents for our future.

Clone is a compelling blend of scientific suspense, dreams dashed, and frauds exposed, with provocative philosophical questions and an astute assessment of why Dolly's birth was only possible now. Like The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Lucy, and Chaos, this book gives us a window on history in the making, and an understanding of its profound effect on our lives.

About this title

About the Author

Gina Kolata is an award-winning senior writer for the New York Times. The winner of numerous writing awards, she has authored several books, including the bestselling Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It. Her latest book is Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss—and the Myths and Realities of Dieting.

Reviews

In February 27, 1997, Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at an animal-husbandry research center near Edinburgh, Scotland, announced in Nature the birth of Dolly. This was no mere birth notice: Dolly was produced by fusing the nucleus of a cell from the udder of a six-year-old sheep with an unfertilized, nucleus-free egg from another sheep. For the first time, the restricted genetic information in the nucleus of a differentiated mammalian cell was reprogrammed to reveal everything it knew about forming all the other cells of the body. In effect, cellular time was reversed -- a terminally differentiated cell reverted to its primordial ancestor. Moreover, Dolly also showed that chemical messages in the cytoplasm of an unfertilized egg can awaken the genes that differentiation puts to sleep. The identification of the ovular messages that repeal the genetic injunctions imposed by differentiation could yield immense benefits to medicine.

Dolly is an identical twin of the anonymous animal that donated the nucleus, but at her birth she was six years younger than her sister. Therein lies the rub. Dolly is a clone, and because, imprisoned in her surrogate womb, Dolly nevertheless had escaped the iron grip of sexual reproduction, she ignited an immediate worldwide reaction. Within weeks of the publication of the paper by Wilmut and his colleagues, politicians in Washington began drawing up prohibitive legislation, and in some European countries and China the cloning of humans was declared illegal. Well-known ethicists decried the experiment on talk shows -- Dolly reminded several commentators of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, The Boys from Brazil, which involved a plot to produce clones of Adolf Hitler, or Woody Allen's Sleeper, in which the cloning of a dictator was attempted from his nose. Meanwhile, Clonaid, a company based in the Bahamas, was proposing to clone humans for a mere $200,000 a copy.

Through all the uproar and self-righteous posturing, the science that created Dolly and the potential benefits of cloning mammals were neglected or seriously misunderstood. Few who spoke out publicly recognized the possible practical applications of the technique and how cloning from an adult nucleus could advance our understanding of normal and abnormal differentiation, aging, and cancer. Wilmut's motivation had nothing to do with cloning humans. He wanted to improve livestock and make genetically engineered animal factories that would produce medically useful proteins, such as clotting factors. Indeed, 10 months after Wilmut's paper was published, Schnieke et al. (Science 1997;278:2130-3) reported that they had fused enucleated ovine oocytes with fetal fibroblasts -- not with adult cells, as Wilmut had done -- that had been transfected with the gene for factor IX linked to the promoter for the (beta)-lactoglobulin gene for the purpose of producing sheep that would secrete the scarce human clotting factor in their milk.

The two books under review deal with these fascinating matters in different ways. In Clone, Gina Kolata, a well-known science writer for the New York Times, takes us on a breezy, journalistic tour of cloning. The writing is vivid and clear. Anyone who reads her book will come away with an appreciation of the main scientific and ethical issues. She will engage you with the historical background and sharply etched portraits of the leading figures in the drama. As a journalist, Kolata has an ear for chitchat and scandal. For example, she gives us an extended account of David Rorvik's book In His Image: The Cloning of a Man (Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott, 1978), which was advertised as a true chronicle of the cloning of a mysterious, unnamed millionaire; the publisher ultimately admitted that it was a hoax. And she tells in detail the story of Karl Illmensee, who fooled the scientific community for years with his claim to have cloned mice by nuclear transfer. The relevance of these lengthy asides to the main issues is dubious, but Clone is worthwhile as an entertaining summary of the biology of the new millennium.

In Remaking Eden Lee Silver, a professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, gives us a panoramic view of molecular genetics, sexual reproduction, in vitro fertilization, and cloning. His book is an outstanding achievement. Silver addresses the uninitiated with clear writing and straightforward explanations of complex phenomena, but experts, especially ethicists and policy makers, will also profit from reading this book. Any physician should find this book remarkable. Silver analyzes the issues soberly, often with provocative examples. Some of his cases are hypothetical; others are drawn from real life.

A high point of the book is Silver's analysis of the treatment of Anissa Ayala, a girl with acute myelogenous leukemia who received a bone marrow transplant from her sister; the sister had been deliberately conceived in the hope that her marrow would be histocompatible with Anissa's. The new sister's marrow was indeed a match, and five years later Anissa, now a hematopoietic chimera, appeared to be cured. Silver's answer to prominent ethicists who strongly objected to this procedure is simple: what's wrong with it when the motive is love and affection? Who had the right to say that Marissa, the new sister, would not be loved for herself as much as Anissa? Silver's approach to ethical issues related to cloning and in vitro fertilization is refreshing: no nonsense, no pontificating, just the facts, just common sense. He makes his position clear with the question, "Why is it that so many politicians seem to care so much about cloning but so little about the welfare of children in general?"

According to legend, 1000 years ago King Canute tried to hold back the tides. Those who believe that they can limit the progress of science -- or any other branch of human knowledge -- will repeat Canute's error. Barbara Tuchman's classic A Distant Mirror (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978) and a recent translation of Johan Huizinga's magisterial The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) give us an extraordinary picture of the superstition, ignorance, folly, and pestilence that ruled Western Europe 500 years ago. Five hundred years later we have arrived at Dolly, and there is no way of turning back. Instead, the imperative is to use our knowledge with the compassion advocated by Lee Silver. Gina Kolata is wrong when she emphasizes that by producing Dolly, Wilmut was "breaking the laws of nature." Nature's laws cannot be broken. What we must understand is that Wilmut's feat revealed, rather than broke, the laws of nature. The remarkable potential of this revelation is a cause for hope, not despair.

Reviewed by Robert S. Schwartz, M.D.
Copyright © 1998 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

Not a quickie to exploit the news sensation of the year, Kolata's review of the before-during-and-aftermath of the cloning of a Scottish sheep is a well-researched account of critical events in the history of embryology and developmental biology. The feat was remarkable because Dolly was born from an egg whose nucleus had been replaced by the nucleus taken from the udder cell of an adult sheep. It was Kolata who broke the story in the New York Times last spring, swelling a media frenzy that led to public fear, congressional action, and bioethicist pronouncements, all the while elevating a modest Ian Wilmut to world-celebrity status. Yet only a year earlier Wilmut and his partner, Keith Campbell, had published an account of the birth of identical twin sheep-clones developed from late embryo cells that had already differentiated into something akin to skin cells. Why didn't that stun the readers of the august journal Nature? Here Kolata is on target in describing the trendiness and elitism of science: Molecular biologists and gene theorists, with their knockout mice and gene-of-the-week discoveries, pay scant heed to veterinarians pursuing commercial ends. In Wilmut's case those ends involved the potential for making animal clones that might carry useful human genes whose products--such as insulin--might be secreted in sheep breast milk. Also, the consensus was that there was a species barrier and that cloning of mammals was impossible. How that consensus came about is in itself a fascinating story of early pioneers interspersed with scandal, suspicions of fraud, and out-and-out contempt for the 1978 book In His Image, which purported to be the story of the cloning of a man. Kolata concludes with a thoughtful chapter on the ethical issues: At this stage there is no easy answer to where the line should be drawn in cloning experiments. All the more reason the book should appeal to readers who want to learn the facts and think for themselves. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this readable history of cloning, New York Times science writer Kolata focuses on the controversial aspects of the issue. An indispensable work for high school, public, and college libraries. (LJ 11/15/97)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0688156924
• ISBN 13: 9780688156923
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288