Biotech's real power lies in reading the book of life, not blindly copying it. By David Stipp To put the recent cloning of a sheep in perspective, it helps to keep in mind two things: Dogs and sex.
The British scientists' achievement ranks as a major first. They showed that DNA from an adult mammal can revert to an embryonic state and then duplicate the animal whence it came. But as a feat of genetic manipulation, Dolly's cloning hardly compares with what dog breeders have done over the centuries: mold a mammal's genome like play-doh to create a menagerie worthy of Dr. Seuss. Imagine what the bioengineers who fashioned those wadded-up hippo-faced canines, the Shar-Pei breed, might have done with Dolly's kind.
We'll get to sex by way of a question: Will Dolly the sheep change our lives? For all the furor about cloning, it has inspired few ideas for truly doable things--the kind, say, that would play in a Peoria investors' club.
Consider cloning herds of supercows from a champion milk producer. Setting aside the fact that dairy farms are constantly going bust because we're awash in milk, the idea is nevertheless deeply flawed. Biologist Ursula Goodenough came close to the reason with her quip to the New York Times: If cloning were perfected, she said, "there'd be no need for men." Very funny, Ursula--we all know men, women, and whoopee were meant to be. Sex isn't just fun, it's serious business.
Here's why sex really matters--and why cloning makes for bad breeding. Our microbial enemies constantly evolve ways to defeat our defenses and invade our cells. Sex is our brilliant countermeasure, originated by evolution eons ago. By mingling genes, male and female creatures arm their offspring with novel DNA combinations. Microbes equipped to burglarize one generation's cells find the cellular locks changed in the next. In short, without sex, we'd soon be toast for germs. And cloned, genetically identical cows would be sitting ducks for epidemics.
Another proposal, cloning gene-tweaked animals that make human medicines in their milk, has more merit. It would keep the beasts' precious genomes from being sullied over time by sexual gene mixing. But Dolly was the only success in 277 cloning tries. There seem to be better ways already to generate living drug factories. This month, for example, researchers reported making human hemoglobin-needed for blood substitutes--in bioengineered tobacco plants, of all things.
Of course, the excitement about cloning has little to do with its practical value. What really rivets us is the idea of cloning ourselves. Indeed, Dolly represents the perfect discovery for the me Generation--it can now fancy itself becoming the Me Me Me Generation. We'll not bore you with a litany of dark possibilities--surely you'll scream if you hear the word Orwellian again.
Instead, a modest prediction: The benefits of human cloning, if any, won't be compelling enough to induce scientists to risk their careers, and possibly even their necks, trying to realize them.
But they'll risk much to understand how genes work. That knowledge will pay in ways cloning never can. Smart money in places like Peoria already is flowing to the practitioners of a new branch of biotech, genomics, which promises to extend the genetics revolution far beyond mere therapies for our bodily scourges--to actually curing and preventing them. Recently Silicon Valley has emerged as the Florence of this Renaissance, thanks largely to biochips in the works there that promise to be the X-ray machines of the gene age.
David Stipp, © 1997, FORTUNE
Última Atualização: 23/Set/99
