ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, March 3, 1997 TAG: 9703030137
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: Associated Press
First a sheep, then a monkey. Where will it end?
Nobody knows, but there is little doubt among experts that the cloning of embryonic rhesus monkey cells, announced Saturday in Oregon, brings science one step closer to the Godlike power of human mass production.
Although the Oregon scientists' achievement pales next to last week's announcement by Scottish scientists that they carbon-copied a 6-year-old ewe, it carries cloning across both scientific and ethical thresholds.
``It shows that the techniques work in an animal that's a bit closer to humans,'' said Thomas Murray, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Suddenly, futuristic reproductive technologies are being applied to something much closer to home than dull-witted farm animals bred for the slaughter. Now science is working with the chromosomes of a species that sits on the fuzzy boundary of humanity.
A few days after the Vatican called for a ban on cloning human beings, Pope John Paul II denounced ``dangerous experiments'' that harm human dignity.
In his usual Sunday address to Roman Catholics gathered in St. Peter's Square, the pope focused on the biblical story of Jesus driving money changers from the Temple of Jerusalem.
John Paul decried the ``temple merchants of our age'' who make ``the marketplace their religion, until they trample ... the dignity of the human person with abuses of every kind.''
``We are thinking, for example, about the lack of respect for life, which has become at times the object of dangerous experiments.''
The pope did not mention specifically the cloning of Dolly the sheep or the monkeys in Oregon. On Wednesday, however, the Vatican newspaper urged governments to quickly pass laws banning the cloning of human beings because people have the right to be born ``in a human way.''
The monkeys were cloned from eight-celled embryos that had barely begun life themselves, a feat that already has been accomplished not only in sheep, but also in cattle, pigs and rabbits. But because they are so closely related to human beings, cloning monkeys is a whole new ballgame.
``It is a new species, and I think the fact that it was done in a primate is significant,'' said Caird Rexroad, an expert in animal genetics at the Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Md.
Rexroad declined to discuss the the implications of the news for human medical science, noting that his employer, the federal government, would rather he not talk about cloning people.
But, he said, ``I think it's easy enough to read between the lines.''
``Everyone is really excited about the potential of this, and I think it's going to make for much, much better science, and much better experiments,'' said Susan Smith, director of the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center, where the research was conducted.
The monkey cloning is less technically impressive than last week's sheep shocker mostly because of the type of cell that was cloned. In the case of the sheep, a mammary cell was taken from an adult ewe, and its genetic material used to direct the creation of a new sheep. It is literally as if researchers had chopped off a piece of a sheep and created a lamb.
In the monkey cloning, however, researchers cloned cells from an eight-celled embryo. There was no adult animal copied; no living, breathing thing reproduced with perfect genetic fidelity.
``This is profoundly different from the donor tissues that we used,'' said Ian Wilmut, the Scottish scientist who stunned the world last week with the announcement that he had completely short-circuited the sheep reproductive process. ``So it's an interesting and encouraging and necessary step forward.''
Wilmut pointed out that in the Oregon development ``the material they used is fundamentally different and easier to work with.''
And while the cloning of adult human beings is a more distant possibility, the scientists are well aware of the specter they have raised.
``The idea that there is a rich person who is a maverick or an eccentric or worse out on some island is what we call the Jurassic Park syndrome,'' said Russ Meintz, director of the Center for Gene Research and Biotechnology at Oregon State University. ``It's more science fiction than reality.''
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Two rhesus monkeys, born last August from clonedby CNBembryos, huddle together at the Oregon Regional Primate Research
Center in Beaverton, Ore.