The clone ranger

On December 5th, a graying man in the audience of a seminar about cloning stood up and announced that he was starting to organize a clinic to clone human beings. Richard Seed, a Chicago-based entrepreneur, was not a familiar face to the crowd of geneticists, fertility experts and bioethicists. But, following the news last year about Dolly the cloned lamb, his audacious plan couldn’t simply be laughed off. And journalists seemed to be as nonplused as the scientists who first heard the claim. The following day, reporter Marilynn Marchione from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Seed’s grand claim in the first five paragraphs of her story about the seminar, then veered off onto other more mundane topics covered at the meeting. Five days later, the Washington Times (which, unlike the Post, is not read widely) reported Seed’s claim, along with reaction from a bioethicist and a cloning foe on Capitol Hill. Whether these reports went unnoticed or were simply dismissed as too outlandish isn’t clear. But the story was not to die quietly. My colleague at National Public Radio, Joe Palca, caught wind of Richard Seed’s claim and decided to investigate. After flying to Chicago to interview the 69-year-old entrepreneur and some of his colleagues, Palca decided Seed was credible enough that his plan deserved to be aired. On January 6th, NPR reported that Seed was trying to raise money and line up collaborators to offer cloning as an alternative to other treatments for infertility. The report was skeptical about Seed’s ability — both technically and financially — to carry off such a scheme. Seed is trained as a physicist, not a physician (though he has pursued some fertility research with success). And, as he made clear in the interview, Seed doesn’t mind going against the current ethics about pursuing such research. “God made man in His own image,” Seed said. “God intended for man to become one with God. We are going to become one with God. We are going to have almost as much knowledge and almost as much power as God. Cloning and the reprogramming of DNA is the first serious step in becoming one with God.”