Brave New Sheep? Baa.

By Rick Horowitz

What we have here is a classic case of deja ewe.

She's the name on everyone's lips, the face on everyone's TV screen. She's hot. She's now. She's happening.

She's happened.

She's Dolly the Lamb, the Milestone Clone, seven months old and the spitting image of her mother. Which is exactly what the Scottish scientists who created her had in mind, and which immediately raises all sorts of troubling ethical questions, such as:

"Two Dennis Rodmans?"

Not to mention:

"Scottish scientists?"

They said it couldn't be done, cloning an adult mammal, but the Scottish scientists went and did it anyway, using simple tools available in any biology lab and most auto-body shops.

Here's how they did it: They took the nucleus of an adult sheep's mammary cell, then they used that nucleus, with its DNA codes, to replace the nucleus of an unfertilized sheep egg. Then, through a highly technical process called "messing around in there," they somehow got that altered egg to start acting just like a fertilized egg, dividing and subdividing until it created the world's largest wool-covered breast --

Wrong. Dividing and subdividing until it created a new sheep that was an exact genetic copy of the old sheep.

They called the new sheep Dolly, after Dolly Parton (Get it? Mammary cells? Dolly Parton?) -- proving once again that the frontiers of science are limited only by our imagination, and also that there's a good reason so few comedy shows are shot in Scotland.

Anyway, they say it's an exact genetic copy, but let's be honest here -- how do we know? They're sheep; they all look alike anyway. What are we supposed to do, whip out our electron microscopes and check out some nuclei?

I'm not saying these scientists are lying; I'm just saying I'm not about to spend the extra bucks for a matched set of lamb chops just because some guys in Scotland wrote some magazine article.

On the other hand, this whole thing has got lots of other people very excited -- everyone from bio-ethicists, who may have to clone themselves to handle the demand for TV interviews, to Hollywood producers, who are intrigued by the plot possibilities and thrilled to realize that sheep never ask for a percentage of the gross.

Of course, movies about cloning have been done before, my personal favorite being "The Boys From Brazil," where the multiple mini-Hitlers not only looked just like the young Adolf, but even combed their hair down across their foreheads the way the Fuhrer did, demonstrating once and for all that there is a genetic basis for bad hairstyling.

But that's reel life; what about real life? Will actual humans want to clone themselves? Are you kidding? Of course they will.

Just think of it: your chance to turn out the perfect baby -- you, that is, all over again -- without all those messy leaves and twigs floating around in your beloved's gene pool. Just imagine: you, guided by you, profiting from everything you've ever learned about being you. Your kid'll rule the world, right?

Wrong.

Your kid, and every other kid. You think your own clone will be the lone clone? No way; there'll be millions of them, fussing and fighting for the top spot. Which all goes to show: Science is swell, but there can be too much of a good thing.

Dolly Parton comes to mind.

2/25/97

©1997 Rick Horowitz. All rights reserved.