CHICAGO (AP) - An independent scientist said today he plans to begin
work on cloning a human being despite widespread opposition to using
newly developed techniques on people.
Richard Seed said he is still in the planning stages, but hopes to get
started in a few months.
Seed's plans were criticized by the White House as being reckless.
``The scientific community ought to make it clear to Dr. Seed - and I
think the president will make it clear to Dr. Seed - that he has elected
to become irresponsible, unethical and unprofessional should he pursue
the course that he outlined today,'' President Clinton's spokesman Mike
McCurry said.
Seed acknowledged he is unsure if he can accomplish his goal, and
genetics researchers questioned whether human cloning is yet
technologically possible.
He said his project would cost about $2 million but take far less to get
started.
Seed, who says he has a doctorate in physics from Harvard but is not
affiliated with any institution, told reporters outside his suburban
Riverside home that wants to use cloning to help infertile couples, and
that he has four couples willing to participate.
Seed said he planned to use the same techniques that Scottish scientists
used in 1996 to clone the adult sheep Dolly, the first cloned mammal.
DNA would be removed from a woman's egg and replaced with DNA from the
person to be cloned. Once the fertilized egg grows to 50 to 100 cells,
the embryo would be transferred to a woman.
Seed said earlier he hoped that within 1 1/2 years he would produce a
pregnancy capable of lasting at least two months.
A national panel recommended last year after Dolly's cloning that
Congress ban human cloning, saying it poses unacceptable risks of
mutations and raises troubling ethical questions.
Several measures to ban cloning await congressional action.
Seed today called himself a good Methodist who believes humans were
created in God's image and said God intends them to become like him.
This, he said, includes learning to live forever.
``God made man in his own image. Therefore He intended that man should
become one with God. Man should have an indefinite life and have
indefinite knowledge. And we're going to do it, and this is one step,''
Seed said.
When a reporter told Seed some people would say he is ``nuts,'' he
replied: ``That word has been used before. I prefer eccentric or
brilliant or near genius.''
A genetics researcher said today he thinks it is unlikely - but not
impossible - that Seed can accomplish the task within his time frame.
``We're still in a relative state of ignorance'' about how to make this
work, said Dr. Robert H. Foote, a reproductive physiologist at Cornell
University. ``We don't know it can even be done in humans.''
Foote pointed out that researchers worked with 277 sheep before
successfully cloning Dolly.
``Maybe Seed will get enough money'' for the human-cloning experiment,
Foote said, ``but all of my scientific friends are against this type of
thing, not so much because it's technically impossible, but because they
don't see any need to do this kind of thing.''
Dr. Yury Verlinsky, director of the reproductive genetics institute at
Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Chicago, called Seed's comments ``an
irresponsible'' attempt to make news.
Verlinsky said that while human cloning is theoretically possible, he
doesn't think it can be done now because of ethical, technological and
financial limits.
Seed said he would like to locate his clinic in the Chicago area but is
also considering opening it in another country.
AP-NY-01-07-98 1422EST