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PRESS RELEASE - 14 February 2003 - Immediate release
Dolly the Sheep : The Death of an Icon
Dr Donald Bruce, Society Religion & Technology Project, Church of Scotland
Tel. 0131-240 2250, Fax 0131-240 2239, Email: srtp@srtp.org.uk http://www.srtp.org.uk or Church of Scotland Press Office 0131- 240 2243
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The death of Dolly the cloned sheep is an untimely end to an experiment which rewrote the laws of biology. Her creation in 1996 made it possible, in principle, to turn any cell of the body back into an embryo, and to start again with a genetic replica. Conventional biology said it was impossible.
She became an icon for both the promise and the threat of biotechnology - what could be done that was thought impossible in genetics and embryology, and the fears about what should not be done.
She caught the imagination of the media as the first new scientific breakthrough in the age of the Internet, but often with more confusion over cloning than reality. In doing so, she brought home, in a way no other recent discovery has, the need to bring ethics into the heart of scientific research. She stressed the urgent need to guide how we should use the biotechnology she represented, and where we should draw the line and say "we could do it, but we're not going to." More than anything she represents a limit of technology - that we must not apply reproductive cloning to humans.
It is one thing to clone a sheep to find better ways to produce pharmaceutical proteins in her milk - the original reason why Roslin and PPL got into sheep cloning, and ethically acceptable as far as it went. It is quite another to use the method to make cloned human babies. It is ethically unacceptable to be given someone else's genetic make up, and it would be criminally irresponsible to attempt to clone humans, given the persistent animal welfare problems that have attended most animal cloning, Dolly included. Recent cloned baby claims are probably a hoax, but it highlights the need a universal ban on reproductive human cloning. In May 1997 the Church of Scotland were amongst the first to call for this. Last year's French and German government proposals for a UN prohibition have widespread international support but are held up by US desire to widen the scope to include research uses of the cloning technique, for which there seems no prospect of consensus.
Dolly was a one-off experiment. So no one can say if her relatively early death or her arthritis were a signficant indicator about cloning in general. A single case proves nothing scientifically, but it does signal the need for a wider study of cloning and welfare if the technology is ever to go further in animals. Enough problems have been found in animal cloning - during pregnancy, after birth, in unusual diseases and premature deaths - to indicate that cloning animals is something which should not be attempted without good reason. Cloning to enable the otherwise impossible genetic modification of pigs to provide organs for transplant might be acceptable. To clone simply to create genetic copies of prime animal breeding stock is treating an animal too much as a production line widget. Cloning to "recreate" a lost pet, as in the cloned cat, is an abuse of technology and a pointless exercise, since it would create a different animal that might not even look the same.
Dolly was the image that symbolised British achievement in science at the UK pavilion at the EXPO2000 exhibition. Her real legacy may be less in cloning as such than in how the technique used for her birth may lead to understanding of how cells develop or go wrong. That remains in the future. She was a media celebrity as no sheep has ever been. It remains to be seen whether in scientific terms her remarkable creation was a backwater or of lasting significance.
Dr Bruce is Director of Society Religion and Technology Project of the Church of Scotland. He chairs an expert working group on the ethics of animal and crop genetic engineering and co-edited "Engineering Genesis", which examined the ethics and welfare of animal cloning.
Tel: 0131-240 2250, Fax 0131-240 2239
Email: srtp@srtp.org.uk http://www.srtp.org.uk
or Church of Scotland Press Office 0131- 240 2243
Dr Bruce is Director of the Society Religion and Technology Project of the Church of Scotland, assessing ethical issues in technology for Scotland's national church. He chaired an expert working group on the ethics of genetic engineering in animals and plants, which produced the acclaimed book "Engineering Genesis", which examined the ethics of both xenotransplantation and animal cloning.
