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Are We Like Sheep?
Questions and reflections on cloning
THANKS TO BOOKS LIKE FRANKENSTEIN and movies like The Boys from Brazil, I long ago formed an anxious opinion of what happens when science starts restacking the building blocks of life. So it was with some trepidation, one day this spring, that I climbed the three flights of stairs in Paige Lab, on the western brow of the UMass campus, to meet some of the top DNA docs in the nation.
In these laboratories, suffused with the smells of sulfur and formaldehyde, experiments with genetic engineering and cloning, or exact replication of an organism from its own genetic material, have been in the works for a dozen years. Despite their slightly daunting workplace, professors James Robl and Abel Ponce de Leon of veterinary and animal science turn out to be thoroughly personable individuals.
Robl, a scientist wholly enthused by his lifework, is a reproductive and developmental biologist who has been involved with cloning for most of his career. When a Scottish sheep named Dolly hit the headlines in March, Robl was besieged by media requests on the subject; his views were cited in the New York Times and aired on National Public Radio.
Ponce de Leon, whose graduate degrees are from UMass and whose boot-black hair is in singular contrast with the whiteness of his beard, is avuncular in his cableknit sweater and philosophic manner. (He is also leaving us. In July, he takes up a new post as head of the animal science department at the Univesity of Minnesota.) Ponce de Leon's work is devoted to creating chromosome "maps" of farm animals: a boon in gauging exactly where to insert a gene in the cell of an animal one wishes to modify and replicate.
Together with colleague Steven Stice, professors Ponce de Leon and Robl head up one of the few cloning efforts in this country taking place at the university level. Unlike their counterparts in Edinburgh, they seek to genetically not whole animals, but embryos, or unborn offspring, from cattle, pigs, and poultry. They are confident that, with some further tinkering, the day will come when ''modified animals'' will produce a steady supply of insulin-producing cells for diabetics, organs for transplants, and chickens all exactly same size, with a predictable muscle- mass that meat producers and a growing human population will find appealing.
Three years ago, the three men launched a firm called Advanced Cell Technology, or ACT, to develop possible agricultural and pharmaceutical applications for their research. They rent office and laboratory space in downtown Amherst, and anticipate the doubling of their nine-person staff in the next year. Over the past year they've filed four patents, all still pending; while ACT retains exclusive licensing rights, the university owns the patents and would receive royalties from any products marketed. The scientists' estimate of the windfall that could be reaped by UMass is $10 million per product.
The prospect of profits at the end of the cloning rainbow is no small factor in keeping scientists motivated. There have been times when the future of cloning looked extremely uncertain, when the world watched as researchers heralded breakthroughs only to have their results debunked in subsequent tests. Said Robl, "We've done a lot of grunt work, looking at things in a very systematic way, step by step, trying to determine where we think there is commercial value." That tenacity is on the brink of paying off: If just one product licensed by ACT is successful in the ''multiple markets'' that have expressed interest in their work, estimated profits range from $200 million to $1 billion.
All of this raises fascinating and important questions in addition to the already massive ones posed by the biological promise, the moral and ethical implications of altering life, and the threat of abusing our powers in the lab.
First, how should UMass, or any university, respond when large amounts of money are flowing in its direction from outside sources? (For example, ACT's Main Street lab is sponsored by a poultry-breeding company in Maine.) If the work being done in a department is marketable, who should profit? In an era when corporate funding is replacing shrinking public monies, these questions become more pressing. The arrangement is that profits are shared between the individual, the department, and the university's general fund; a newly created university office guides researchers through the complex maze of patent procedure and law. How does this relate to the notion, however antiquated or imprecise, of the university as a place of pure inquiry?
Second, what is the mission of UMass, or of any university? Is it, as the original land-grant idea suggested, to provide the newest research to practicing farmers and train future ones? Is it to provide labs and materials to researchers who may also profit as individuals? Is it to act as a petri-dish for technologies that could be used by industry or the government? Perhaps the university's mission is all of the above. But then who or what determines if there are conflicts of interest, be they conflicts of money, materials or a faculty member's time? Or again, why devote resources helping struggling dairy farmers in Hadley if the future clearly lies in engineering cows whose milk produces the right amounts of protein for a highly profitable drug? Can universities afford not to head in that direction?
Finally, there is the fundamental role of the university as a forum for all voices when new ideas or technologys arise. That the UMass campus does serve as such a forum is reflected in the opinions that follow. But the experience of writing this article also suggested the constraints--perhaps political, perhaps professional, perhaps simply collegial--that operate within it. There were scientists hesitant to be interviewed for an article that might raise questions about colleagues' research. If the scientific fraternity generally is expressing enthusiasm, who wants to be a lone dissenter?
None of these questions is new--novelist (and academic) Jane Smiley raised them all in her recent book Moo--and none is unique to cloning. But cloning can be thought of as a rock dropped into a pool, with each concentric, ever-enlarging ring inviting us to consider the implications encompassed in a single technology.
On a final note, it was interesting to note that nearly all the people who shared their thoughts on this technology focused the conversation on cloned human beings. Though Robl, Stice, and Ponce de Leon assure us that the cloning of people is some distance down the road, it's clear that foremost in most people's minds is the ultimate, human form that cloning may take.
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