body cells inserted into an enucleated egg cell from awoman who does not have anything wrong with her mitochondrial genes. The embryowould then be implanted into the woman who donated the nucleus, and she wouldcarry it full term.Imagine for a moment that your wife needs a bone-marrow transplant and no onecan provide a match; that your wife's early menopause has made her infertile; or that your4-month-old has died of SIDS and your grief has made it impossible to get your mindaround the fact that he is gone forever. Would the news of cloning really be so easy todismiss that around the world, there are scientists in labs pressing ahead with plans toduplicate a human being, deploying the same technology that allowed Scottish scientiststo clone Dolly the sheep four years ago?Inquiries are pouring in because some scientists are ever more willing to say yes,perhaps we can. Last month a well-known fertility specialist, Panayiotis Zavos of theUniversity of Kentucky, announced that he and Italian researcher Severino Antinori, theman who almost seven years ago helped a 62-year-old woman give birth using donoreggs, were forming a "consortium" to produce the first human clone. Given what researchers have learned since Dolly, no one thinks the mechanics ofcloning are very hard: take a donor egg, suck out the nucleus, and hence the DNA, andfuse it with, say, a skin cell from the human being copied. Then, with the help of anelectrical current, the reconstituted cell should begin growing into a genetic duplicate.The consensus among biotechnology specialists is that within a few years--somescientists believe a few months--the news will break of the birth of the first human clone. At the moment, the American public is plainly not ready to move quickly oncloning. In a TIME/CNN poll last week, 90% of respondents thought it was a bad idea toclone human beings. Cloning right now looks like it's coming to us on a magic carpet,piloted by a cult leader, sold to ...
