"History is written as we speak, its borders are mapped long before any of us open our mouths, and written history, which makes the common knowledge out of which our newspapers report the events of the day, creates its own refugees, displaced persons, men and women without a country, cast out of time, the living dead: are you still alive, really?" -- Greil Marcus from The Dustbin of History
In December of 1997, an eccentric white-haired scientist with no money, no job, and no affiliations to any university or institution walked into a major genetics conference and announced, in what the New York Times called a "vague and rambling" speech, his grandiose plans “to produce a two-month pregnancy in a [human] female within a year and a half’s time” by means of cellular cloning.
It’s been ten years.
Sixty-nine year old reproductive biologist Dr. Richard Seed’s announcement sparked a worldwide media frenzy, upset many of his colleagues, and frightened the state of California and 19 European nations into signing immediate bans against human cloning. White House spokesman Michael McCurry told the press, “The scientific community ought to make it clear to Dr. Seed -– and I think the President will make it clear to Dr. Seed -– that he has elected to become irresponsible, unethical, and unprofessional should he pursue the course that he has outlined today."
McCurry’s statement took a lot for granted. For one, it assumed that there existed a clear and universal understanding of the ethics, responsibilities, and standards involved, which was and is no more true of human cloning than any other issue involving reproductive rights or biotech's expanding frontiers. It also assumed that a renegade like Dr. Seed would be affected by peer pressure from a group who wouldn’t have him as a member (“I’m an independent thinker...”) and by a president (“He doesn’t have the power to stop me...”) who at the time was acting just as unprofessionally and unethically as he was (“As far as I’m concerned, he’s slick, sleazy Willie...”). "You can't stop science," Seed liked to say. But before anyone stopped Richard Seed*, we stopped paying attention.
Beginning with sensational headlines, then spurred by Joe Palca’s ten-minute profile on NPR, and developing into a flurry of appearances on network news and morning talk shows, the spotlight had just begun to turn full-force on Dr. Seed when the Clinton-Lewinsky affair erupted and upstaged everything. The doctor's fifteen minutes of fame was about to run out, anyway. The mainstream media had quickly soured on his story once they realized Seed was essentially a quack and the underlying issues were much more complex and consequential than anyone had time for or really wanted to tackle. The networks especially were already looking for an exit and were just lucky to come across Monica's dress after Bill did. What followed was that dizzying post-modern move where they switched the human cloning story to a self-analysis of how they covered it, for which they scolded themselves a bit, then let it drop.
The context in which they did so was this: A national bioethics commission had just presented Congress with 109 pages of reasons to ban human cloning. Most developed countries already had legal restrictions in place prohibitting the growth of experimental human embryos, but not the United States. A year earlier, in response to the news that an adult sheep had been successfully cloned in Scotland, President Clinton had banned the use of federal funds for human cloning research, but legislation to ban privately funded research stalled in the final session of Congress. A new Congress was scheduled to revisit the topic in the weeks ahead when Dr. Seed made his announcement. Clinton responded to Seed by reiterating his earlier ban and asking the private sector to observe a similar ban voluntarily until the law caught up. He then conceded, however, that even with such restraints in place, there was still no real way to stop a very rich man from setting up an island laboratory for endlessly cloning himself once such a thing became possible. It was a strange, science fiction scenario to hear from our Commander in Chief, reminiscent of one of William Burroughs’s paranoid fantasies about black market medicine -- like the short story “Immortality” in which an old trillionaire, Mr. Hart, is looking to transplant his ego, which he believes resides in the mid-brain at the top of his head: "Well he thinks couldn’t we just scoop it out of a healthy youth, throw his in the garbage where it belongs, and slide in MEEEEEEE. So he starts looking for a brain surgeon, a 'scrambled egg' man, and he wants the best. When it comes to a short order job old Doc Zeit is tops. He can switch eggs in an alley... "**
Meanwhile, Seed was moving ahead with his plans to open a Human Cloning Clinic in Chicago and then, if that proved profitable, to expand to ten or twenty around the country, maybe five or six abroad. He had already negotiated with a local fertility clinic whose name and location he never disclosed but whose facilities allegedly contained all the equipment his project required. In addition, he had four couples who'd signed up in advance. (Three had one infertile partner. In the fourth, both were. "There are no sperm and eggs," Seed pointed out, "so the only way for them to transmit their genes is to clone.") Seed said he was prepared to take them “offshore” if necessary, to move his operations overseas, perhaps to the Cayman Islands or the Bahamas he half jested, if human cloning were outlawed here. He also spoke of relocating to Tijuana where, after paying a half-million dollar bribe, he would open a free medical center in a poor part of town “to buy good will” so they would have a harder time tossing him out. He was even considering using such a tactic on his own city government. “Hey, what if I put up a free medical clinic in the Chicago Housing Authority?” he once mused. “This is worth thinking about!” According to all reports, not counting the significant technological challenges, his only major roadblock remained his lack of proper funding. He claimed it was only going to take $2 million and that he already had some of the money and a full lab staff lined up. He also had two agents ready for the potential book and movie rights if he did create the first human clone. In fact, he felt that so much money could be made, he was willing to pay $50,000 apiece to the first three successful clone-bearing mothers. Thanks to the burst of publicity following his announcement, Seed was confident that funders would emerge and he could soon begin work. And that’s when the coverage stopped. To Be Continued... except it wasn't.It's been ten years.
MP3: Frankenstein's Den by The Hollywood Flames
The son of a prominent Chicago surgeon who helped pioneer blood banking in the 1930s, Richard Seed sported three degrees from Harvard, including a PhD in physics. He was variously described as brilliant, mysterious, rude, impatient, cold, calculated, insufferable, haunted, dangerous, dynamic, defiant, demonic, and deeply committed to radical science. He was known to be habitually distant to his children, inspiring to his colleagues, and completely maddening to his wives. He was called a Bible-thumping prophet, a one-man cult, a maverick, an oddball, a fruitcake, and a flop. He was portrayed as Dr. Frankenstein, for what he wished to bring to life, and as Franken-stein’s monster, for how he was brought to life by the press. Tribune columnist John Kass even compared Seed’s freakish celebrity to a sideshow, with otherwise responsible journalists acting like carnie barkers “selling tickets to the tent of Jo-Jo the Dog Faced Boy.”
He was also brazenly honest, quick to speak his mind, and admittedly not very good at relating to people he considered unintelligent which, coming from someone who once introduced himself as “the smartest man in the world,” basically meant he had a hard time relating to anyone. In perhaps his most revealing bit of self-assessment, he referred to himself as “a former near genius”: a genius, he said, because God gave him an extraordinary amount of creative and inventive talent, near because he had come close but never quite made the kind of enormous contribution to society you would expect from such a mind, and former because he was almost 70 years old and "you lose a lot of brain cells as you get older." The undying arrogance, the sting of failures, the peculiar mechanistic thinking -- you could hear it all in that single phrase.
One brave reporter elicited the opinion of Seed’s second wife, Zaroohy, who claimed her ex-husband was mainly driven by the desire for money (which he would get then promptly “shit down the toilet”), followed by the need for a scientific challenge and the quest for immortality. (She said that he once wanted to be preserved cryogenically but, if he had been, she would have pulled the plug.) Although one might tend to question a bitter ex's perspective, even the briefest glance at the doctor's past confirmed her diagnosis.A devout member of the First United Methodist Church in Oak Park, Illinois, Seed was convinced that human cloning was part of God’s plan.
"In the first two chapters of the Old Testament,” he explained, “we learned that God made man in his own image. He intended the union of man and God. Is this union spiritual or in body? I think it is talking about the body.” Seed reckoned that cloning was the first step toward becoming one with our creator, and the second was the manipulation of our genetic material to end the aging of the cells. “Indefinite life extension,” he called it. "Eventually, we are going to have almost as much knowledge and almost as much power as God.” So, according to Seed, all we have to do is live long enough and then we'll know every-thing. (No one asked what we'd do about the increasing overpopulation of a planet whose populace won't die. It was probably assumed immortality would be the ultimate luxury that only the privileged few could afford -- but, despite the President's island scenario, no one broached that subject either.) As far as the mainstream media was concerned, he might as well have started ranting about UFOs. I'm not sure what kind of person we thought would be the first to attempt cloning humans, but the networks seemed less concerned about a man with Seed's quirks tinkering with our genes and more worried about how they looked giving so much airtime to such an obvious nut.In a related bit of personal expression, Dr. Seed told foreign reporters during a visit to Scotland that he would not clone homosexuals, whom he described as “genetic defects,” at his clinic. According to polls at the time, homosexual couples, for obvious reasons of procreative inability, represented a good number of the more than 5 million Americans who said they would consider cloning themselves. Anya Palmer of the gay pressure group Stonewall said Seed was dreaming if he thought he could use genetics to wipe out gays. (Seed also said he would only treat couples “who look nice,” for which Palmer then acccused him of trying to create a master race of “good-looking heterosexuals.” This was as close as Seed got to inviting a discussion of eugenics.) Seed just shrugged her off and said there's always an argument whenever someone like him tries to do anything new.
MP3: The Mad Scientist by The Zanies
Throughout his life, Seed was always trying something new. And like many experimental minds, he had a habit of leaving lots of unfinished work in his wake. He seemed to abandon the scientific challenges he so daringly pursued once the challenge had gone out of the science. “He has a problem with follow-through," said his son Russell. "He has no sense of closure.” In the 1950s, for instance, Seed began a semi-conductor business in his basement, back when few people had heard of the device. He left the company right before semi-conductors became the infrastructure of the computer industry, just missing out on his chance to cash in. Then he went into gas lasers and the same thing happened. His son likened his attention span to a toddler’s.
He was briefly famous in the 1970s when, with his brother Randolph, he ran Embryo Transplant Corp., a company which produced high-yield milk cows through a non-surgical procedure that involved super-ovulating the most productive cows, flushing the embryos out of the uterus, then implanting them in other cows, producing up to 12 calves from one “super cow.” The farming industry was in trouble that year, though, and Seed’s company, which depended on the strength of agribusiness, went bust along with the farms. As the 1980s approached, he tried using this same animal technique to transfer fertilized embryos from one woman to another for Fertility and Genetics Research, Inc., a company he helped found. Out of that, he got one paper published and one woman pregnant. The eggs didn’t flush out as easily from humans, so the technique never caught on. Technology surpassed him soon after and quickly phased his company out.He also tried a variety of get-rich ventures throughout his life, such as attempting to get a North Shore venture capitalist, Walter G. Cornet III, to invest $35 million in a scheme to acquire seven small fishing fleets with which Seed claimed, in all seriousness, that he could corner the world market in fish-meal. “I thought he was a couple of bubbles off plumb,” Cornet quipped. It was a clever idea, though, which might have worked, but Cornet didn’t have the funds and Seed didn’t pursue it any further. Instead he went into mortgage financing with his son Russell, where, bored and careless, he quickly lost his shirt. The summer before his big announcement, his own Oak Park home of 12 years was finally foreclosed, forcing him to live in a modest suburban home owned by two of his children while being supported on a secretary’s salary by his wife. By the time he became a celebrity, he was totally broke. "Bad investments," he explained.
The media reported these patterns but missed what they suggested. With his typical sense of timing, Seed had arrived on the human cloning scene early and perhaps prematurely as many of his critics suggested. However, he had already displayed over and over a knack for finding fields of science which were likely to boom and beating everyone else to the punch. Like an old prospector, he seemed able to tell where a gold rush was going to hit. Whether Seed would or could succeed at human cloning was almost irrelevant. His mere presence at the forefront was an alert to the possibility that human cloning might soon develop into a profitable trade. Although he usually failed at the business end himself, it should have been noted that he almost always accomplished his scientific task. Thus, if these patterns were about to repeat, the clinic he had planned was likely to collapse and he'd probably stay poor, but he'd make human cloning happen. It was inevitable, he said: “If not me, someone else. If not here, somewhere else. If not now, then.” It's been ten years.
The New York Times said he seemed like “a recruit from central casting”: a white-haired scientist with a beard, twinkling eyes, a mischevous smile and a checkered past. An eccentric prone to outrageous comments, he was a natural candidate for media star. But more than that, Dr. Seed was an unequalled American character. He was so utterly American, from his short attention span to his warped Christian thinking, that he appeared at times to have been invented. Even though human cloning was seen as futuristic, for him the pursuit was almost old fashioned. On one level, it was really nothing more than a brave individualist effort to climb from rags to riches and fame -- an Horatio Alger tale for the 21st Century. But then he amplified Alger like no one had done before, because for him human cloning was also the first step toward realizing his own personal vision, a dream which, when distilled, gave voice to the ultimate rendition –- if not the underlying essence –- of the great mythic American Dream: to be a rich immortal genius with a unique relationship to God.
It's been ten years. I wonder how he's doing. •
* Even after the mainstream media had decided the whole episode was nothing but a tragic joke, what the Tribune termed a “sad comedy,” everyone still held back the most obvious punchlines. Although the subject was reproductive technology and journalists are generally addicted to irony and puns, no one noted, for instance, that this man who said he could asexually impregnate an infertile woman with her own genetic duplicate was named, of all things, Dick Seed. One New York Times article noted how the doctor’s name “gave his procreative adventure a sense of destiny,” but the comment pertained to his last name only. No one noted that his entire name sounded like a euphemism for semen, an otherwise vital component of the reproductive process that remained conspicuously absent in his work.
** If we're going to give Nostradomus credit for Hitler from Hisler, we might as well give Burroughs credit for Dr. Seed from Doc Zeit. Seed's plans, after all, included literally scrambling some eggs.
Mad Scientist Lego found on Brick Brothers, the Lego builders blog. Marilyn Monroes by Andy Warhol, the king of cloning art. John Carradine probably played more mad scientists than any actor ever, but a bigger geek than me will have to confirm this. Man trapped in hour glass illustration by Jim Steranko. The Han Solo in Carbonite Mini-Fridge is an example of pitched but rejected Stars Wars merchandise. Others include headphones in the shape of Princess Leia's hair and a BBQ grill in the shape of the Death Star. "Eat My Fear" was David Lynch's contribution to the New York Cow Parade in the year 2000 which was banned from the public art exhibition for being too gruesome. Detourned comic from Garfield Minus Garfield. Save Clone High was an attempt to keep M-TV from cancelling the 2003 cartoon series which tackled such teen issues as "whether ADD can be caught from toilet seats." Clone High now airs on Teletoon in Canada. The Rollin' Clones are a Rolling Stones tribute band. Meet the Clones was a fake punk band flyer created by collage artist Winston Smith in 1978. At Cafe Press, you can buy t-shirts for fictional bands from movies and TV shows, such as Citizen Dick from the film "Singles" and the Frozen Embryos from the series "My So-Called Life."
Further reading:
Reader beware. All books on this subject tend to be biased in some form and it may simply be impossible not to be. These two titles attempt to collect essays of various opinion to present a general overview, thus providing an entry point at least to the issues.Clones and Clones: Facts and Fantasies About Human Cloning edited by Martha Nussbaum and Cass Sunstein.
The Human Cloning Debate edited by Glenn McGee, Arthur Caplan, and Roopali Malhotra.
Further viewing:
O Clone (a.k.a. El Clon, or The Clone), is a syndicated Brazilian soap opera (in Portuguese) set in Morroco which airs in the U.S. (in Spanish) on Telemundo. The main storyline sounds like some-thing you might expect from Charlie Kaufman: a love triangle develops between Jade and Lucas and, yes, Lucas's clone, pitting the poor guy against his own younger, less bitter self.Some lesser known movies about cloning and/or human duplication:
Cat O'Nine Tails (1970). IMDB: "Franco is a blind man who lives with his young niece and makes a living writing crossword puzzles. One night, while walking on the street, he overhears a weird conversation between two men sitting in a car parked in front of a medical institute where genetic experiments are performed..." (Directed by giallo master Dario Argento.)
The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (1971). IMDB: "A U.S. Senator is spirited away to a secret New Mexico medical lab after a serious car crash. His injuries are completely healed by a secret organization that has developed advanced medical technology. What does the organization want in exchange for saving his life? Meanwhile, a reporter who witnessed the accident decides to investigate the Senator's disappearance..." (Dated precursor of the 2005 movie The Island.)Anna to the Infinite Power (1983). IMDB: "Anna Hart was always an odd child -- a genius, a shoplifter, desperately afraid of flickering lights, with strange prophetic dreams. Anna is watching TV one night and sees someone who appears to be her exact double..."
Night of the Lepus (1972). "Ladies and gentlemen, attention! There is a herd of killer rabbits headed this way and we desperately need your help!" (Actual quote, which you can hear and download for yourself at BadMovies.org.) A hormone intended to alter the breeding cycle of rabbits overrunning ranchlands instead turns them into flesh-eating, 150-pound monsters. If you think you haven't seen it, guess again. Footage from Night of the Lepus appears briefly in The Matrix and randomly throughout Natural Born Killers. In case you were wondering what the people who made Black Sheep were thinking...
