In the late 1980s, Richard Seed, tall and imposing, walked into a Glenview venture capitalist’s office with a plan: With $35 million they could control the world’s supply of fishmeal from menhaden, a garbage fish.
“He came out here and he sat in the chair right in front of me and said, `I’m the world’s smartest man,’ ” said Walter G. Cornett III, who has heard 7,000 business pitches over the last decade.
“I thought he was kidding. He was dead serious,” Cornett said.
Richard Seed, who never jokes about how smart he is, never became a fishmeal mogul. Now, in the collective consciousness, he has become just one thing: The odd and mercurial, but only marginally successful, scientist who wants to set up a human cloning lab in the Chicago area.
In a flash, this man, a bundle of oddities and ideas, somehow commandeered a spot on the world stage last week as he offered to use cloning to bring mankind closer to what God had in mind.
As if through spontaneous generation, all the fears, all the questions about cloning–Is it moral? Is it safe? Is it even possible?– seemed to get a fresh jolt of life.
With satellite dishes for ears, the world listened to Richard Seed.
President Clinton, who has proposed legislation to ban human cloning for at least five years, said in his radio address Saturday he found Seed’s plans “profoundly troubling,” adding, “It’s now clearer than ever the legislation is exactly what is needed.”
Seed’s achievement, perhaps ignominious, is more likely to be that he was the first to break the silence about human cloning than that he was the first to accomplish it.
His peculiar life–as pieced together with public records and interviews with Seed and his family and associates–is a study in intellectual inspiration and fiscal frustration, though with a decidedly oddball twist.
He has known moments of extraordinary prescience about technology, starting a semi-conductor business in the 1950s and reproductive enterprises in the ’80s.
At 69, he has money problems. “Bad investments,” he said. “Mostly in my own projects.” He had to move from his Oak Park Victorian home after a bank foreclosed on his mortgage in July.
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Born to a family that can paper its walls with diplomas, he has a mind with wheels spinning fast, though never quite on the track that leads to breakthrough and fortune.
“I am only a near-genius,” he says in a moment that, for him, verges on humility. “I am not a genius. I will never win a Nobel Prize so I am subjected to continuous frustration.”
Despite his new, grandiose business plan (Motto: “Identical twins — 30 years apart!”), it appears certain that Seed will never be able to claim a human clone as one of his products.
Doubts have been raised about whether he truly has a partnership with an undisclosed reproductive physician, an imperative for the venture. And his most recent scientific work–skin grafts on four mice–was not only unsuccessful, but seems paltry in comparison with his past promise and accomplishment.
By the end of a remarkable week in the life of Richard Seed and the world’s evolving struggle with cloning, what some had feared was a real-life science fiction horror story was looking more like a sad comedy.
“He’s searching for a bit of fame and glory and something to make his name,” said his brother, John Seed, a physician in Princeton, N.J. “There are financial things too. He’d like to make a fast buck.”
So far that has eluded him, despite the brains, the academic dossier and the impressive family background.
His father, Dr. Lindon Seed, had been a prominent Chicago surgeon who spent 50 years on the staff of what was then Grant Hospital and, in the 1930s, helped pioneer blood banking. In 1960, he was named to the Omni Research Foundation, a now-defunct Downers Grove think-tank dedicated to “rolling back the aging process through research.”
Two of his four children followed him into medicine. But his son Richard was drawn more to physical science.
Richard Seed says he was the smartest kid in his high school, and also the most disliked.
“I am proud of the fact that I was the most unpopular person at Oak Park High School,” he said. “But I was better known by a factor of two than the most popular students.”
By Seed’s account, he was valedictorian, “the smartest kid in the school.” The archives there, though, list him as third of about 750 in the Class of 1945, behind Mary Anne Norris and Barbara Gross.
By 1953 he had three Harvard University degrees: a bachelor’s (cum laude), a master’s and a Ph.D. in physics.
He spent his Harvard years tooling around Cambridge in a ’38 Packard hearse, which he deduced was the cheapest transportation available. “I was a clever fellow,” said Seed.
Almost immediately, he set up the first of his business ventures, a basement semiconductor business he formed in 1958.
“He wasn’t careful about finances and some investors got control and threw him out,” John Seed said.
From there, he worked on technology using lasers to be used as cutters in manufacturing.
“He was able to demonstrate at trade shows, but nobody invested in it and that went broke,” John Seed said.
Around 1970, Seed almost overnight left physics and started exploring biology. When asked last week why he made the switch, his eyes grew large, and with some defiance, he declared, “It just popped into my head!”
With partners, he formed Embryo Transplant Corp., which used high-tech reproductive techniques to create super-producing milk cows. That company, however, ran into trouble when farmers didn’t pay their bills, the brother said.
Seed and others were aware, though, that the same technique could be used on humans to impregnate women who could not produce eggs of their own.
A 1984 article in the Wall Street Journal began like this:
“As many as 3 million American women are having trouble getting pregnant, and the Seed brothers want to help.
“Richard Seed, a nuclear physicist turned biomedical engineer, has developed a technique for transferring fertilized embryos from one woman to another. His brother, Randolph, a surgeon, did the early clinical research on the method. Their work resulted last month in the first successful embryo transfer.”
The public television science show, Nova, devoted 15 minutes to the company two years later.
The firm, Fertility & Genetics Research Inc., hoped to offer embryo transfers commercially, a market the partners believed would grow to 50,000 procedures a year.
The company hooked up with a Chicago investment banker and raised millions of dollars in a public stock offering.
It never did live up to the hype. A competitor’s method for transferring embryos proved more successful. There weren’t 50,000 paying patients, only a handful, leading to three live births, according to Seed.
The company, just imperceptibly off the cutting edge of science, “died a slow, painful death,” he said. In the end, Fertility & Genetics Research was peddling cost-management services and supplies, such as ostomy bags, to nursing homes.
In 1990, Seed got into another business altogether: mortgage financing.
Seed started the business with his son Russell–one of seven children–after refinancing his own home, said Ronald Drabeck, who worked at the company.
Seed said the money was good–he made $200,000 a year for a time. Eventually, though, he lost money in the mortgage business too, he said.
“He’s not interested in money,” said Drabeck. “He loves to invent things.”
Drabeck remembers Seed sitting in the mortgage office “fiddling around” with a staple gun that could be used to close incisions.
Eventually, Drabeck said, somebody else got a patent on a similar device and made a bundle.
“He was lighthearted about it,” Drabeck said. “It was on to the next invention.”
Three years ago, Seed was off on a new intellectual quest, seeing if transfusions could help reduce rejection of transplanted organs.
Seed’s research, conducted until Jan. 3 in leased space at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was modest: four mice rented at 19 cents a day.
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Over three years, Seed paid UIC several thousand of dollars to perform his research, which involved testing the immune systems of mice undergoing skin grafts.
Seed was “almost never on campus,” said Edward Tate, a UIC spokesman. A veterinarian who helped carry out Seed’s experiment called Seed to keep him apprised.
“Just four little ol’ mice,” Tate said, “and all he was doing was giving occasional blood transfusions with the hypothesis that the transfusions would increase their tolerance for a transplant–a simple skin graft to the side of their bodies.”
Staffers completed the grafts on Christmas Eve, Tate said, but after 10 days the grafts were rejected. “That ended the experiment and the mice were euthanized,” Tate said.
The next week, National Public Radio aired a story on a proposal Seed had made while attending a Chicago symposium on reproduction in December, and Richard Seed, the would-be cloner, began his rush into the public eye.
Some in the historic neighborhood in Oak Park where Seed lived for about 10 years weren’t surprised about his desire to clone humans.
“I remember one day he stopped and said, `Hey Barbara, how much money do you have?’ ” said Barbara Moline, who has lived on the block for about 19 years. “Well, I said, `I think that’s a rather personal question,’ and his reply was, `Well I need about $75,000 to get this cloning effort off the ground. And I was wondering if you could loan me some money.’ “
There have been moments in the short time the world has known Richard Seed when his talk has seemed to veer from the outlandish toward the maniacal–saying that this will make man more like God, a creator who can live for eternity.
“I think God wants this to occur,” he said.
Seed’s Methodist pastor, however, sees nothing abhorrent in Seed’s theology.
A devout churchgoer, Seed attends adult Bible studies at First United Methodist Church of Oak Park, and he and Pastor Thomas Cross often hash out theological issues in the Gothic-style church.
“I have real respect for Richard as a person who takes his faith seriously, and as someone who is a compassionate man,” said Cross. “And I think that’s the genesis of all this, that’s his starting point. We should not discourage him. We should encourage him.”
Encouragement likely won’t be enough.
Along with millions of dollars in financing, Seed would also need a physician qualified to perform a number of procedures akin to those used in in-vitro fertilization.
Seed claimed he had one, a physician he refused to name but described as an obstetrician/gynecologist who runs an in-vitro clinic and used to work at Michael Reese Hospital. Seed said he has known this physician for years and that one of this physician’s own patients asked about cloning.
Only one person who fit Seed’s general description conceded that the two had often debated the issue of human cloning: Dr. W. Paul Dmowski, who said Seed had approached him about human cloning but that he wasn’t interested.
On Thursday night, when a reporter told Seed at his Riverside house that Dmowski had no intention of setting up a cloning clinic, Seed was taken aback.
He sank onto his love seat near an end table with books including “Black Market Adoption” and “Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World.” Seed sat in silence for a while before saying, “Good. Good that that’s his attitude.”
Later, he said, “I’ll deny that he’s part of our team.”
Even people who oppose human cloning think it is only a matter of time before somebody does it.
“I think we should ban it because there will be a great temptation for scientists who are interested in playing God or winning research awards or getting new intellectual property rights to go ahead,” said Lori Andrews, a reproductive law specialist at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. She added: “I think that someone will do cloning, but I think that probably it will not be Richard Seed.”
Among the prophecies Richard Seed uttered in recent days, there is one that seems to stand out for its prescience. Said Seed with the same characteristic wave of his hand with which he casts off the stupid and the inefficient: “I expect to become old news by next week.”