Cloning one day could vaccinate Third World children against disease, without needles, doctors or even vaccines.

It could put the perfect steak on your grill every night of the year.

Or it could set off a chain of scientific and policy missteps that threaten human existence.

Fear and fascination follow the groundbreaking work of scientists at Texas A&M University; in DeForest, Wis.; Lexington, Ky.; and other locations around the globe, where the controversial scientific process is being researched and refined.

Both sides in the debate agree cloning, only decades old as a science, has the potential of fundamentally changing the world. Opponents fear it will be a change for the worse, with reckless scientists creating aberrations and monstrosities that can't be controlled - or will die in writhing pain.

Proponents say it could eliminate the life-threatening wait of transplant patients for donor organs.

People will be able to forge lifelong bonds with animal companions and their genetically identical offspring.

Extinct species could be preserved or, in some cases, re-created.

While legislators debate the ethics of cloning and corporations vie for patents and potential billion-dollar windfalls, scientists are churning out replicated animals with relative ease. The success rate is up and the cost is falling.

Cloning could be coming to a table near you soon. Japanese officials, after initial consumer backlash, have ruled that beef and milk from cows cloned from the cells of adult animals are safe, a signal the government is set to lift the ban on their consumption.

In the United States, the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council released a report in August that says food products from cloned farm animals and fish appear to be safe for consumers, and that food products from genetically altered animals also appear safe despite concerns that genetically altered animals could escape from captivity and start new gene pools.

The report was commissioned by the Food and Drug Administration, which is developing policy for the introduction of cloned animals into the food supply.
Just five years after Dolly gained fame as the world's first cloned sheep, thousands of replicated goats, sheep, cattle, pigs and mice - created by independent teams of private, university and government researchers - are no longer roaming the outer fringes of science and are already showing up increasingly in pastures and labs.

Want a clone of your prized bull? Cyagra, a Massachusetts animal-genetics company, will do it for just under $20,000. Want to bank your dog's genes while waiting for scientists to perfect a cloning program? It'll cost $895 now and $100 a year for storage at Genetic Savings and Clone, a company set up to market A&M research.

Cloned animals will make drugs to treat disease, proponents say. Cloned animals will provide spare parts when yours fail.

And it's coming to pass in places like A&M's Reproductive Sciences Lab, where Taeyong Shin works a desktop-sized machine called a micro-manipulator, a device that is part high-powered microscope, part robotic arms.

Watching the action through a viewfinder, Shin works fast, yanking out a nucleus every minute from a set of cells removed from a cow.

Within weeks, viable nuclei collected in this session will be inserted into an equally promising set of eggs taken from a second cow and, after being cultured for a few days, inserted into the uterus of a third cow.

And if all goes well, in 283 days or so, Shin and his A&M colleagues will have cloned another cow.

Here in Aggieland, home to one of the world's top cloning labs, creating animals doesn't draw the attention that it once did, Shin says.

Case in point: There are nearly three dozen cloned animals on campus. Shin has worked on all of them. While A&M's bull and cat accomplishments earned
international headlines, 28 cloned piglets have come into the world under media radar.

In nearly every instance, the goal isn't to pad the books of the animal kingdom, but rather the eventual development of commercial applications ranging from top-notch rib roast and replacement pets to designer medicine and four-legged organ factories.

Take, for instance, 1,200 pounds of black Angus power named 86, who spends his days in a pasture just off Agronomy Road.

Two years ago, 86 was a cluster of tissue cells in a petri dish, snipped 15 years earlier from a donor named Bull 86, so named because it was the 86th bull A&M researchers bought for a scientific project.

The result: 86 is identical, in both demeanor and appearance, to his "father."
More importantly, 86 has inherited three significant genetic traits of the original Bull 86: natural resistance to brucellosis, tuberculosis and salmonellosis, three infectious diseases that can decimate cattle herds.

The potential, says Dr. Joe Templeton, a colleague of Shin's at A&M and the researcher who bought the original Bull 86, is the creation of herds of disease-resistant cattle, a savings of billions to ranchers here and in developing countries.

Now, Shin, a lanky Korean who came to College Station to be at the center of the cloning universe, can walk out of the lab, slip on rubber boots and go out into the pasture to play with 86, the animal he assembled two years ago.

The backlash

For every advance in cloning, however, there is backlash.

In Japan, consumers balked when they found Tokyo markets were selling beef from cloned cows. A Massachusetts company has endured a fusillade of criticism, as well as a congressional inquiry, after it reported surreptitiously cloning three human embryos, none of which survived. Three foreign scientists, working independently, say they will clone a human this year, prompting governments around the world to ban the practice.

Cloning is the Frankenstein metaphor for the 21st century, a political and religious controversy that could engulf the world.

To opponents, cloning calls to mind images of renegade scientists, operating free of government oversight and wielding biotechnology like a weapon, haphazardly tweaking genes and molecules to create an army of chimera, piles of discarded embryos and waves of amber, mutated grain.

World governments and the scientific community are split on the subject. While the U.S. government has banned creating new embryonic stem-cell lines, it has no laws against human cloning.

Several bills banning the practice were introduced in the Senate this year, but none could muster enough support to pass.

As for animal cloning, the FDA oversees the process of drug production and is drafting guidelines with regard to food production.

Hard-liners in the cloning debate want science to abandon all genetic modification. They point to the accelerated aging of Dolly, the sheep cloned by Scotland's Roslin Institute in 1997, as well as reports of obesity of lab mice cloned in Cincinnati last year.

Human cloning, they say, points to a ghastly future.

"This is a qualitative turning point in how we look at life," said Jeremy Rifkin, an economist, the founder of the Foundation on Economic Trends and a vocal opponent of cloning. "Once you begin with the proposition that life, at its earliest stages, can be created for experimentation, you've entered the first stages of commercial eugenics."

A moderate group agrees on a ban of human cloning, but encourages the continuation of lab work that involves both human and animal fetuses.

That research, such as Texas A&M's efforts to clone a billionaire's dog, appear to be the product of eccentricity and biology. But the dog research could have a significant impact on mankind, said A&M's Dr. Mark Westhusin, one of the world's top cloning scientists.

For starters, science developed through the research to understand the canine reproductive process could lead to ways to control pet populations, Westhusin said.

"The scientific opportunities of this research are enormous," he says. "The things we'll learn on the way to cloning a dog are mind-boggling and could affect human reproductive science."

The other end of the spectrum is represented by three scientists who boast that their efforts to clone humans already are under way.

Appearing before Congress in May, Kentucky fertility clinic owner Dr. Panos Zavos, one of the three, referred to human cloning as if it were a Cold War issue.

"By banning cloning, America will be showing the world that she is hesitant and or reluctant to take the lead in this new arena of technological advancement," Zavos said during a House Government Reform subcommittee hearing. "This genie is out of the bottle and it keeps getting bigger by the hour."

Rapid advances

Zavos is right, experts say. New revelations and discoveries appear in the field of cloning almost every day:

In February, Westhusin and colleagues introduced the world's first cloned cat, a healthy and playful calico kitten named CC, for "Copycat." The companion animal business is a $30 billion industry nationally. If pet cloning can be perfected, the cost to pet owners will be six figures initially, with hopes that it can one day be as cheap as $20,000 each. Despite the costs, Genetic Savings and Clone, the company that funded the research, received hundreds of requests from owners the day after CC's birth was announced.

In March, French scientists announced they had successfully cloned rabbits for the first time, a development that lets scientists engineer lab animals that can serve as models for human disease studies.

In late April, scientists from the University of Georgia and Prolinia Inc., a biotech company that works closely with the school, revealed the cloning of a calf from a slab of beef selected randomly from an Athens, Ga., slaughterhouse. The implication is that scientists could develop a way to clone meat of the highest quality, promising consumers a great steak every time.

And in July, scientists at PPL Therapeutics' Blacksburg, Va., lab announced a major breakthrough in the field of harvesting animal organs and tissues for xenotransplantation, which is the transplantation of an organ or tissue from one species to another. On July 25, a litter of so-called "double knock-out" pigs was born, which are clones genetically modified so both copies of a specific gene, which human bodies reject, were knocked out. Experts say it could spawn an $11 billion industry for organs and disease treatment.

Animal-rights advocates say the costs of trial-and-error experiments that destroy some animals in the name of research are too high.

Alan Berger, executive director of the Sacramento, Calif.-based Animal Protection Institute, says many of the pro-cloning arguments are specious.

"Why in the world would you do this?" he asked rhetorically. "What is the problem? What are you trying to accomplish? What are the alternatives? What is the cost-benefit?

"For any of the questions you ask, none of the answers come up favorably."

There's been success in using animal parts, such as the implantation of pig valves in cardiac patients. Berger argues the use of organs - from animals cloned for that purpose - is based on shaky science.

"They've only tried it twice, with two livers, back in 1993, and both of the people died," he said. "They're not even reasonably close on that one."

In the most publicized xenotransplantation case, an infant known as Baby Fae got a baboon heart in 1994. She died 20 days later.

As for pet population control, Kathy Guillermo of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is doubtful.

"It's ridiculous," she said. "Did we come up with human contraceptives by cloning humans?"

"A mark of a civilization is how it treats its fellow creatures," said cloning opponent Rifkin, "because they're powerless and can't take care of themselves.

It doesn't mean they have rights. But they have consciousness. They have their own journeys."

The human cloning debate isn't just political and scientific. Religious leaders have weighed in also, said Suzanne Holland, associate professor of religious and social ethics at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash.

Catholic and certain Evangelical faiths hold that reproductive cloning and stem-cell research is wrong, while other Protestant faiths have a friendlier view of stem cell research.

Most faiths take no stand on animal cloning, with some even applauding the attempts to improve human life through the process of cloning livestock.

"Theologians have been cautious about giving a thumbs up to the (human) cloning process," said Holland, who has written extensively on the subjects of cloning and stem-cell research. "Many cite the 'playing God' issue and that's a point of transgression. They say it's up to God to decide our reproductive fate."

"We've never been told not to play God," she said. "In fact, the Jewish tradition has more affirmation about the importance of humans playing God, in the sense that we're supposed to continue God's creation. That's our job."

Many faiths embrace assisted reproduction. If reproductive cloning is perfected, it's likely it will be embraced as another method of assisted reproduction, such as in-vitro fertilization, Holland said.

Cloning for altruistic reasons, such as having a family, might offend some religions but are likely to be viewed more favorably by the public, she said.

Cloning for narcissistic reasons, such as bringing a loved one back from the dead or because a person wants to "live forever," are sinful, Holland said. "That's pride, or the sin of hubris."

"We have to deal with death," she said. "Not learning to deal with the reality of death of our own mortality is s sin."

Holding judgment

Cloning proponents argue that scientific accomplishments shouldn't be judged until all of the research is done and all the evidence is in.

"One thing the publicity seems to miss is that this is research," said Dr. Duane Kraemer, head of A&M's Reproductive Science Lab. "We don't know the answers.

They don't, either. To assume an answer and decide whether or not it should be done, simply on the basis of not knowing the facts, is irresponsible."

"All cloning looks frivolous," said Dr. H. Richard Adams, a veterinarian and dean of A&M's School of Veterinary Medicine.

"But a bull resistant to TB and brucellosis (an infectious disease that causes stillbirths) would be significant. What if we could populate Third World countries with clones of an animal like that? Or of goats with milk that inoculates children against certain diseases? That's the basic science element people don't understand and don't want to understand."

"We've left this utilitarian view of animals as food and fiber and look at them now more as companions," Adams continued. "People anthropomorphize animals to the extent that there are people who see a rat and a pig and a little girl and say they're all equal. They aren't. I love animals. I've devoted my life to the care of animals and supporting people who own animals. But that doesn't mean that animals are people."