Human Cloning (Dolly the Sheep)

Dolly the sheep had been born quietly on 5 July 1996 at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, but when researchers Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell unveiled her to the public on 22 February 1997 they set off a worldwide moral panic. Dolly was the first mammal cloned from an adult cell using a technique called somatic-cell nuclear transfer: scientists took the DNA-containing nucleus from an ordinary udder cell, slipped it into an egg that had had its own nucleus removed, and coaxed the egg into developing as an embryo. The result was a lamb genetically identical to the sheep the udder cell came from. If it worked in sheep, the obvious question was whether it could work in humans. The Vatican demanded an immediate ban on human cloning. On 4 March 1997 President Bill Clinton issued a presidential memorandum prohibiting federal funding for human-cloning research, and in a 9 June 1997 Rose Garden address he warned that cloning threatened "the sacred family bonds at the very core of our ideals and our society." The National Bioethics Advisory Commission delivered its Cloning Human Beings report that June; UNESCO, the UN's science and culture body, adopted its Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights in November; and in December, Chicago physicist Richard Seed vowed to clone a human before any law could stop him. Bioethicist Leon Kass, writing in The New Republic (2 June 1997), argued that public revulsion at the idea — what he called "the wisdom of repugnance" — was itself a moral signal worth listening to.

In hindsight, what followed was less dystopia than anti-climax. The technique proved stubbornly difficult even in animals, human reproductive cloning never happened, and the panic's real legacy was a generation of bioethics committees, funding bans and international declarations. What was built wasn't a dystopia but the first serious institutional machinery for governing biotechnology: flawed, incomplete and without precedent.