Cloning Pioneer Opposes Making Human Clones Scientist Says There Are ‘Millions Of Kids In The World Who Need Parents Already’

One of the scientists who cloned Dolly from an adult sheep cell says fears of cloning are overblown, but he opposes duplicating humans even to help infertile couples.

“There are millions of kids in the world who need parents already” without having to clone more children, said Keith Campbell of PPL Therapeutics in Roslin, Scotland. “And the pressure put upon the clone to be, personality wise, like the person they were cloned from would be so great it would be horrendous.”

He said cloning’s true promise is to mass-produce identical farm animals that are genetically altered so they make disease-fighting drugs and cells, more nutritious milk and foods, and organs that can be transplanted into people without rejection.

Campbell spoke at Silver Lake Lodge as 130 researchers from 13 nations met at Deer Valley Resort for a three-day conference titled “Genetically Engineering and Cloning Animals” and sponsored by Utah State University’s Biotechnology Center.

The production of Dolly by Campbell, Ian Wilmut and colleagues at Roslin Institute and PPL generated fear of human cloning because “it’s science fiction and ‘The Boys from Brazil’ and it’s a good story,” Campbell said, citing the book and film about Adolf Hitler clones.

“People have only seen the science-fiction applications of cloning” and don’t appreciate that people are shaped by environmental factors - not just genes.

“If you had 40 Adolf Hitlers that had been cloned, they’d probably be nice guys,” Campbell said during an interview.

A clone is a genetically identical copy of an organism, cell, DNA molecule or gene.

Wilmut was the leading author of the 1997 study that made Dolly the first sheep cloned from an adult sheep’s cell rather than a fetal or embryonic cell, but Campbell was the driving scientific force behind Dolly, said meeting co-chairman and USU professor John Morrey.

Presentations at the meeting focused on improving now-lousy survival rates of genetically modified and/or cloned embryos, which often fail to develop, miscarry or die soon after birth.

Given high death rates in animal-cloning experiments, “we do not even understand enough about the technology for it to be considered safe in humans,” said David Wells, of New Zealand’s government-owned AgResearch.

Campbell’s lecture focused on how a cloned embryo’s survival chances are related to the stage and activity of the donor cell that provides genes and eggs in which those genes are placed.