NETI AND DITTO

By Christine Gorman

It was bad enough when Scottish researchers cloned a sheep named Dolly and commentators started writing about virgin births and Frankenstein. But then one week later, researchers at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center let it be known that they had cloned a pair of rhesus monkeys, named Neti (for nuclear embryo transfer infant) and Ditto, that squinted in the glare of the TV lights and clung to each other for dear life.

It was two clones too many--or, more to the point, clones too close to human for comfort. Politicians--with one eye on re-election and another on the polls (a TIME/CNN survey reported that 3 out of 4 Americans believe such research is "against the will of God")--wasted no time. The President, proclaiming that "each human life is unique, born of a miracle that reaches beyond laboratory science," banned the use of federal funds for human cloning, while Republican Representative Vernon Ehlers of Michigan introduced not one but two anticloning measures.

Lost in the rush of legislative activity was the fact that Neti and Ditto were not so much a step toward a brave new world as a diversion. They were produced from embryos, which makes them clones only in the way that identical twins or triplets are clones. The same technique has already been used with sheep, cattle, rabbits, pigs and even humans--although in the last case the embryonic clones were destroyed. What makes Dolly special is that she was cloned from an adult sheep, not from an embryo. She is the only mammal ever born that is identical to her biological mother.

She may not be the last, however. As NIH director Dr. Harold Varmus told a congressional subcommittee last week, it could take just one infertile couple, arguing that cloning provides their only chance to bear a child, to turn public opinion around.

--By Christine Gorman