The notion that man might sometime soon be reproduced asexually upsets many people. The main public effect of the remarkable clonal frog produced some ten years ago in Oxford by the zoologist John Gurdon has not been awe of the elegant scientific implication of this frog’s existence, but fear that a similar experiment might someday be done with human cells. Until recently, however, this foreboding has seemed more like a science fiction scenario than a real problem which the human race has to live with. We might have expected that many biologists, particularly those whose work impinges upon this possibility, would seriously ponder its implication, and begin a dialogue which would educate the world’s citizens and offer suggestions which our legislative bodies might consider in framing national science policies. On the whole, however, this has not happened. Though a number of scientific papers devoted to the problem of genetic engineering have casually mentioned that clonal reproduction may someday be with us, the discussion to which I am party has been so vague and devoid of meaningful time estimates as to be virtually soporific. Does this effective silence imply a conspiracy to keep the general public unaware of a potential threat to their basic ways of life? Could it be motivated by fear that the general reaction will be a further damning of all science, thereby decreasing even more the limited money available for pure research? Or does it merely tell us that most scientists do live such an ivory-tower existence that they are capable of thinking rationally only about pure science, dismissing more practical matters as subjects for the lawyers, students, clergy, and politicians to face up to. The main reason, I suspect, is that the prospect to most biologists still looks too remote and chancy — not worthy of immediate attention when other matters, like nuclear-weapon over-proliferation and pesticide and auto-exhaust pollution, present society with immediate threats to its orderly continuation. Though scientists as a group form the most future-oriented of all professions, there are few of us who concentrate on events unlikely to become reality within the next decade or two. To almost all the intellectually most adventurous geneticists, the seemingly distant time when cloning might first occur is more to the point than its far reaching implication, were it to be practiced seriously. (Excerpted from an article by James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of the DNA, in ‘The Atlantic Monthly’, May 1971)
