T A B L E+T A L K Richard Nixon lives! Join the "tanned, rested and ready" conversation in Politics D A I L Y+Q U O T E The con artist known as Prince R E C E N T L Y Taps for Sonny Bono By David Corn He came in to Washington as a joke and went out a mensch. (01/07/98) The army of the right By Jonathan Broder An embittered U.S. military is embracing hard right ideologies (01/06/98) Is Kaczynski too crazy to be executed? By Ros Davidson Yes, if the defense can turn him into a human being (01/05/98) And the losers are ... By Andrew Ross Salon's first annual scumbags of the year awards (12/24/97) Pied Piper of the Clinton conspiracists By Gene Lyons British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard thinks the president is guilty of everything (12/23/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		The man who would be God PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "Nobody knows how to do it yet," said Sean Tipton, Washington director of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. "With Dolly, they produced more than 200 fetuses before they got one live birth. It's still dangerous, and you don't experiment on people when you haven't yet figured out how to replicate it reliably in animals." How far away, realistically, is human cloning? "We need to learn about activating the eggs," says Tipton. "We need to learn about and refine our techniques for the nuclear transfer. All these things need to continue on animals. When we get to the point where 90 percent of the time we try it with a sheep, we're successful, then we should try it on primates. And when we get to the point when we can do it reliably with primates, then, in an appropriate setting, with appropriate institutional review of the experimental protocol, you look for patients willing to give their informed consent and you try it out on a human. But you have to be very careful about getting to the point in the correct manner." If Ehlers has his way, that point will never be reached. Even if further successful research on animals made experimentation with human cloning more feasible, he would oppose it for "religious and ethical reasons." "What I want is a ban on human cloning forever, period," says Ehlers. A more measured political response comes from Republican Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee, who was a transplant surgeon before going into politics. Although he has called human cloning "unacceptable," Frist, who held Senate hearings on the subject last year, has indicated he would support federal funding for cloning animal organs for "transplantation into humans." Others question whether any legislation banning human cloning would be constitutional. "We have a tradition in this country of not interfering with people's private reproductive decisions," says Kolata. "So there's a real question whether legislation would survive a legal challenge." In the end, Kolata says, the uproar over Seed's announcement "says more about cloning and the fears and expectations that it raises than it says about the reality of this person who claims he's going to do it." "This is something that has tantalized people for decades, and now for the first time ever, you can say this is biologically possible. People have never had to confront this before. But things that are so emotionally charged don't just happen because somebody says, 'I'm going to do it.' They happen after a lot of anguish, a lot of debate and a lot of soul searching." SALON | Jan 8, 1998 Jonathan Broder is Salon's regular Washington correspondent. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Discuss Richard Seed's plan to clone humans in the Headlines area of Table Talk.