One less egg to fry

While I watched in perplexed amusement how my countrymen tried to break world records the past few weeks in the arena of the longest barbecue, the longest sausage and the most number of couples kissing simultaneously, South Korea broke an important record. It gave the rest of the world the most romantic Valentine’s Day gift this year. After a seven-year itch since Dolly the cloned sheep was born in Scotland, Dr. Woo Suk Hwang and Dr. Shin Yong Moon of Seoul National University in South Korea pushed the science of cloning into its most controversial frontier and announced a few days before Feb. 14, that they were able to finally make human embryos out of cloned cells. You must think I have the most perverse notion of romance to say this. Perhaps, but if the essence of "romance" is novelty and teething possibilities for life coupled with uncertainties, we certainly have the recipe here.

Cloning eliminates the need for the sperm to fertilize the egg. In cloning, a nucleus with a complete genetic code from an adult cell (whoever it is being cloned) is inserted into the egg, previously emptied of its own nucleus. This then develops into a human embryo which at its initial stage, called the blastocystic stage, could theoretically be implanted in a woman’s womb and develop into a baby with the same exact genetic code as the one to whom the adult cell belonged. This means that the "ancient" way of baby-making as humans have known it all along may now be supplanted by this process. Do the fundamental things no longer really apply after all at this level? We would still need the egg as material and the mother’s womb to carry the baby but we would no longer need a man’s seed to provide what was once considered an essential biological ingredient for human life to be conceived. But who is stopping lovers? If at all human cloning passes the ethical and moral hurdles plaguing it now, I think lovers will still be doing the sperm-and-egg roller-coaster razzmatazz but mostly by choice, in the direction that evolution by natural selection has guided the survival of the species. Others may choose the cloning direction with its much larger margin for error since we have not experienced and lived with generations of results yet. But in both cases, I think "cloning" augurs well for romance as lovers will know they do not have to sensually explore each other’s personal geographies to conceive, but if they do so, it will be as a deliberate choice. What can be more meaningful than doing something you do not have to but want to for its own sake? If romance then is that spark that tethers on choice in the face of uncertainties, science does not snatch romance from you but gives it back to you.

Before vanguards of ethics and morals rise up in arms against this development in biotech, we should know that most scientists are against reproductive cloning. In fact, the clear aim of the South Korean scientists was to produce stem cells. Stem cells are human cells that grow into the various human organs. These are the ones extracted from the human embryos. Stem cells hold the promise for "therapeutic cloning," which is the replacement of ailing tissues and body parts with those that can be grown from stem cells that otherwise will form parts of a human body. Some moral critics call it a technology that makes available human body parts like spare parts of a machine and that these were potentially parts of another human being who did not have a chance to form. But what if it were your five-year-old child who is going to be saved by a therapeutically cloned heart? What if it is the love of your life you would lose if she or he were not to have a biotechnically grown liver? What if you, 30 years young yourself, could be saved by these "petri-dish" organs and allow you to have more time to see your young children grow up? Are these not possibilities for life too? And you thought the issue of reproductive cloning was pretty messy. We are entering a brave new world and whether we like it or not, whether we have a leadership that even understands what this development means, our minds have to be ready for it. We have to understand it for ourselves so that we can make choices out of our learning, not out of our misguided fears or ignorance. In other words, that "end" we used to think up record-breakers such as the longest sausage which I think is a pretty apt symbol for what makes us 84 million weak, is not it! It is the other end, north of that. The one that Thomas Edison said the human body was created to carry. The one that seems to be on vacation in political campaigns right now.

I have written my opinion on reproductive cloning over a year ago in a long two-part column entitled "The Meaning of Life Inc." To sum it in brief, I think our difficulty in making sense of cloning, apart from the usual human resistance to novelty, rests in our deep reluctance to let go and cede to mystery, for ourselves when we die, and for others who will take our place. But I think life will find a way out of you, to find out where else it leads, if not through diseases we know now, in other things probably that we do not know yet lurk within the very same brews we developed to keep us from dying. We are bound to die of something one way or the other. It is programmed in our cells and still cells are what we are working on in biotech. It is hard to imagine just conking out because the time is up. Well, nature does that but you have to be a fly to experience it, thus the expression "dropping like flies."

As for the new twist on romance that reproductive cloning brings, it still creates a naughty groove in my mind as to yet another discovery that men are really tethering on the edge of "useless possibilities." Now ladies, do we weep at the passing of what once was a glorious male current in the stream of life? Do we really mourn when we have one less egg to fry?

* * *

For comments, e-mail at [email protected].