RICHARD SEED SAYS YES. A physicist with a longstanding interest in human fertility, Seed says he and a (yet unnamed) team of physicians and scientists will be ready to start working on these new babies in a scant 90 days. He doesn't have the money to start a clinic, and he doesn't have any institutional affilition, and by some reports, he doesn't have any couples waiting for his "product" (by other reports, he has as many as 4 specific couples interested), but he's raising money, and in a recent press conference he also stated that profit from the baby-cloning biz would be "desirable".

Richard Seed isn't getting a lot of attention, beyond reporting on his initial announcement and his follow-up press conference, but the issue of human cloning has been particularly visible since the Roslin Institute, in Scotland, reported in February 1997 that researchers there had cloned an adult sheep to produce "Dolly". Since then, Congress has been working on a legislative ban on human cloning research, and there is a five-year moratorium on such research already in place.

Animal cloning -- and genetic manipulation of cloned animals -- does raise some troubling issues. The Roslin group has created sheep that secrete human proteins in their milk, and some have gone so far as to say that one day "all" pharmaceuticals will be produced this way -- in "earth-friendly, small bioreactors" such as farm animals. Others have, of course, stepped forward to criticize this new level of "commoditization" of animals. A complex debate that touches on many things, including how we get our food, the animal-cloning controversy has been overshadowed by concerns about human cloning.

Seed claims that cloning is the best opportunity for some infertile couples, but human cloning raises some particularly troubling issues. For example, there is a very real possibility that some humans might want copies of themselves for "spare parts", and it opens the debate on the genetic manipulation of "designer babies". Others keep the human-cloning debate close to fertility issues, saying no one has a right to dictate how an individual chooses to become a parent. And many object to cloning on the basis that the essential uniqueness of each human being is a crucial trait to preserve.

What do you think of cloning humans? Tell The Net Net! Read responses from the January 26th issue.

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