When it finally happened — after years of ethical hand wringing and science- fiction fantasy — it was done in such a low-key way by researchers so quiet and self-effacing that the world nearly missed it. The landmark experiment was reported by Jerry Hall at a meeting of the American Fertility Society in Montreal three weeks ago. Afterward, colleagues came up to congratulate him and say “Nice job.” Others voted to give his paper, written with his supervisor, Dr. Robert Stillman, the conference’s first prize. But nobody seemed to want to pursue the one fact that made his little experiment — in which he started with 17 microscopic embryos and multiplied them like the Bible’s loaves and fishes into 48 — different from anything that had preceded it. Hall flew back to George Washington University, where he is director of the in-vitro lab and where Stillman heads the entire in-vitro fertilization program, reassured that people would view his work as he saw it: a modest scientific advance that might someday prove useful for treating certain types of infertility. How wrong he was. When the story broke last week — on the front page of the New York Times under the headline Scientist Clones Human Embryos, And Creates an Ethical Challenge — everybody focused on the one thing the scientists seemed willing to overlook: the cells Hall had manipulated came not from plants or pigs or rabbits or cows, but from human beings. Once it was out, the news that human embryos had been cloned flew around the world with the speed of sound bites bouncing off satellites. That afternoon the switchboard at George Washington logged 250 calls from the press. By the next day more calls and faxes were flooding in from as far away as Spain, Sweden, South Africa and Australia. A spokesman for the Japan Medical Association found the experiment “unthinkable.” French President Francois Mitterrand pronounced himself “horrified.” The Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano warned in a front-page editorial that such procedures could lead humanity down “a tunnel of madness.” It was the start of the fiercest scientific debate about medical ethics since the birth of the first test-tube baby 15 years ago. A line had been crossed. A taboo broken. A Brave New World of cookie-cutter humans, baked and bred to order, seemed, if not just around the corner, then just over the horizon. Ethicists called up nightmare visions of baby farming, of clones cannibalized for spare parts. Policymakers pointed to the vacuum in U.S. bioethical leadership. Critics decried the commercialization of fertility technology, and protesters took to the streets, calling for an immediate ban on human-embryo cloning. Scientists steeled themselves against a backlash they feared would obstruct a promising field of research — and close off options to the infertile couples the original experiment had intended to serve. Indeed, the results of a TIME/CNN poll taken last week suggest that Americans find the idea of human cloning deeply troubling: 3 out of 4 disapprove. A substantial 40% would put a temporary halt on research, and 46% would favor a law making it a crime to clone a human being.
