A day or two ago, Richard Seed was a broke, eccentric scientist winding down his career unremarkably, despite his convictions about how smart he is.
On Wednesday, his face, trimmed with a prophet’s beard, was beamed around the globe via satellite as he uttered aphorisms about God, science and reproduction. Overnight, the Riverside resident had become the embodiment of the world’s fears about human cloning.
This he did simply by breaking step from the scientists who insist that human cloning is abhorrent, saying he would like to set up shop and do it soon.
Seed has no doubt about his ability to do this, despite a past problem with medical malpractice, no formal training in reproductive biology and inconvenient practical details such as having defaulted on his mortgage and being evicted from his Oak Park home last July.
Since then, he has been a self-employed researcher renting lab space at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he said the use of a mouse for experiments costs just 19 cents a day.
Nonetheless, he moved from one interview chair to another Wednesday and whipped up a frenzy of debate with his proposal to clone a human being for profit by mid-1999.
Within hours, even the White House and Congress had weighed in, with top officials and political leaders denouncing Seed’s plans as unethical and serving notice they would try to stop him. White House spokesman Mike McCurry said that Seed “has elected to become irresponsible, unethical, unprofessional should he pursue the course that he has outlined today.”
“I for one don’t want to live in a brave new world of sidewalk cloning clinics,” said House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas). “Congress should pass a human cloning ban quickly and stop this experimentation before it starts.”
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But there are many other roadblocks.
Seed admits he is broke, so who will pay for the cloning clinic? How will he find enough women to donate their eggs? How will he overcome the high failure rate encountered in animal cloning experiments? Who would bear liability for a deformed child?
None of this fazes Seed, a 69-year-old physicist-turned-biologist who in the 1980s formed a company that tried, unsuccessfully, to make a profit as a pioneer in human embryo transplants.
“You can’t stop human cloning, it’s inevitable,” Seed said. “Once there are a half-dozen happy, healthy, bouncing clones on TV and a dozen happy parents, people will endorse this enthusiastically.”
Seed, a Harvard-trained physicist and a church-going Methodist, sees human cloning as an intellectual challenge and the fulfillment of God’s plan.
“God made man in his image,” said Seed, whose 6-foot-4-inch frame has become stooped. “His plan for humankind is that we will become one with God, and this is a significant step in that direction.”
Man, he explained, will become creator.
Seed actually announced his proposal a month ago at a Chicago symposium on reproductive technology.
“Clones are going to be fun,” he said at the conference. “I can’t wait to make two or three of my own self.”
Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, described the audience reaction as “stunned indifference combined with probably unprecedented cynicism.”
“Seed announcing that he wants to clone humans is like me announcing that I want to take a space launch to Mars,” Caplan said.
“Our fear of the nut and the renegade and the mad scientist is so strong that even when we have somebody who meets most of that description, we worry about it.”
Not everyone was entirely dismissive of Seed.
Dr. Harrith Hasson, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Chicago’s Weiss Memorial Hospital, said in a statement that he had worked with Seed decades ago to develop techniques for human embryo transfer.
“Although quite eccentric, Richard Seed is a very bright person with a fertile imagination and impressive organizational skills. He has always been drawn toward very original projects that others tended to avoid.”
Seed says: “Many advances in human civilization are done by people or groups who do not meet with general approval.”
Scientists believe it is theoretically possible to clone humans after Scottish researchers last year announced the cloning of the first mammal, a sheep named Dolly.
In the Scottish procedure, the genetic nucleus of an adult ewe’s breast cell was placed inside an egg, which had its own genes removed. Incubated in a bath of nutrients, the egg began dividing into an embryo. Remarkably, the genes from the adult animal reset themselves to act as if they had just started life as a fertilized egg.
Much of this process remains a scientific mystery and most scientists had thought it could never be done. But it took a lot of time and hard work. Dolly, the first reported success, came after 277 failures.
Seed said that at his clinic, the procedure would work like this:
A couple would be a candidate for human cloning if each partner had fertility problems — the man could not produce suitable sperm and the woman could not produce a healthy egg.
A fertilized egg would then be taken from another woman and, beneath a powerful microscope, the genetic material would be drawn out of it. In its place, technicians would insert the genetic material from a single cell, either from the man or the woman.
“They would have to decide who it would be,” Seed said. “Presumably, then the next year they could get a clone from the opposite partner.”
Seed said he had four couples lined up.
Seed said he is the “front man” for a group of anonymous medical professionals who want to start the cloning clinic.
He described one as an obstetrician/gynecologist who runs his in vitro-fertilization clinic in the Chicago area and formerly worked as an infertility specialist at Michael Reese Hospital.
That doctor, Seed said, didn’t want to be identified because it would hurt his business.
Seed said another associate is an embryologist who studied at Cambridge University in England and the University of Guelph in Canada. A nurse practitioner also is on board, Seed said.
“We have a team in place and a few thousand dollars, all we need is a few million more,” Seed said.
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Seed admits, however, that he has personal money problems. According to government records, a bank foreclosed on the $330,000 mortgage for his Oak Park home and he and his wife were evicted in July.
“It is embarrassing,” he said. “We lived there for 12 years, it was a lovely Victorian.”
Records also show there was a lien against his assets because of non-payment of taxes, a matter which he says has been cleared up.
At the same time, he acknowledges he was convicted in 1990 of a misdemeanor stemming from a medical-malpractice case, but declined to give details because, he said, other people were involved. Court records on the case could not be located Wednesday.
Seed, the son of an Oak Park surgeon, said he got into reproductive sciences on a whim 20 years ago when physics began to bore him.
In the 1970s, he co-founded Embryo Transplant Corporation, which transplanted embryos from one cow to another. By the end of the decade, he was working on a process to do the same thing in humans and co-founded another company, Fertility and Genetics Research.
That company worked to develop a method to transfer a human embryo from a fertile woman to an infertile one, and Seed claims the procedure led to the birth of three healthy babies.
More effective transfer procedures overcame the one used by his company, however, and the enterprise folded.
He says he then “frittered away four years” until, three years ago, he began self-funded research on organ transplantation using mice at the UIC lab.
He does not believe human cloning is much of a step from that.
“It is not a complicated procedure,” he said. In fact, he believes it isn’t nearly enough to help him achieve his boyhood goal of winning a Nobel Prize. Nevertheless, he wants to be first.
“Ego is involved with it,” he said. “I would like to pretend that this is pure humanitarian goodwill, but there is no question, ego is involved.