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By Dawn MacKeen

May 3, 1999 | Lori Andrews has a strange view of the future. In fact, it's downright Orwellian. The bioethicist/attorney foresees masses of people cloning themselves, their dead children, their favorite athletes; parents lining up to special-order their children; new laws prohibiting new crimes, such as pulling hairs from someone to get their DNA. And yet, this science fiction-like future isn't that far away -- only a few years, she says. And with 20 years of studying reproductive technology, her vision might be dead on.

Besides advising Congress and the World Health Organization on the ethical and legal implications of the latest reproductive technology, she has also been called to consult on some real freakish cases. "I was beginning to feel more and more like the Harvey Keitel character in 'Pulp Fiction' -- you know, scientists do some incredibly bizarre new thing and I'm the lawyer called in to clean up," she says. What Andrews says we need, instead of legal advice after the fact, is an open dialogue to define our collective societal values. Science has been forging ahead at such an incredible speed that the law hasn't had a chance to catch up yet.

That's part of the reason she wrote "The Clone Age: Adventures in the New World of Reproductive Technology," a new book that examines the history and impact of reproductive technology. She wants to get people talking. So Salon Health and Body turned the tables on Andrews, who is the director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology and professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, and got her talking about some of the cases she's worked on, and how she's seeing double, triple and quadruple in the years to come.

What's the most absurd case that you've ever been called on?

The most absurd was being called about the rights of the severed head, where a person wanted a doctor to keep his head after he died, in case the technology got developed to reattach it. I told them that the head itself had no rights, that some of the person's relatives had rights to make decisions and if they reattached it there was no precedent to determine if it would legally be considered the same person. To this day, the head is still being frozen, while it waits for the technology to reattach it.

But there are other things going on that I consider beyond the pale. For example, Baylor University applied for a patent in Europe on a technique that allows you to genetically engineer cows to produce medicine in their breast milk. In their patent, they also wanted rights to patent human women who have been genetically engineered to produce the drugs in their breast milk. So that just shows how we're not only thinking of children as products, but sort of people as products. Just this past weekend, another lawyer was called in to a situation where a man wanted to hire a surrogate, give her fertility drugs, have triplets, choose the best child of the three and then give the others up for adoption.

Recently there was a case of a woman getting pregnant from her dead husband's sperm. Is this becoming common practice?

Yes. The American Society of Reproductive Medicine actually has a protocol about it now, and clinics in a number of states have gotten requests from women to collect sperm after their husbands have died, or while their husbands are in a coma. You can collect sperm from comatose men in the same way it is collected from paraplegic men -- through a technique called electroejaculation. In one French case, the man froze sperm in the course of his cancer treatment. His wife was able to use it to give birth and sent out birth invitations that the child had been born to Kim and by Roberto (posthumously). In a California case, the man had actually drawn up a will, given the sperm to his girlfriend, picked a name for the child, wrote a letter to the child, frozen all these sperm samples and then committed suicide. His children by his former marriage sued to stop the girlfriend from getting pregnant and so there was a whole question whether the sperm should be considered part of the estate, and if so, since the girlfriend was entitled to 20 percent of the estate, could she get 20 percent of the sperm? The appellate courts ultimately gave the sperm to the girlfriend and last I checked with her lawyer, she was trying to get pregnant using it.

How about cloning -- is this really going to happen?

Robert Edwards, an embryologist at Cambridge who was responsible for the first test-tube baby, has said that half of the in vitro clinics in the United States have the capacity to do human cloning. It's really the moral barrier that is stopping it. The National Bioethics Advisory Commission was trying to get a five-year moratorium but only four states -- Michigan, Missouri, Rhode Island and California -- have banned cloning. Already there are some companies that are being set up to offer human cloning, but it will probably take a long time to perfect. However, since I see all these other infertility treatments being introduced before they are tested sufficiently, I think we will see people using human cloning in the next few years.

Are there going to be lots of mistakes -- meaning deformed children who are basically science experiments?

Ian Wilmut, who was responsible for Dolly the sheep, has said that one quarter of his sheep have had growth defects, some of which caused their death shortly after birth, and that it's totally irresponsible to try that with humans. Also, the Grenada Corp., which is in Texas, was cloning cows from embryonic cells and they found that 18 to 20 percent died after birth.

Do you think that there is some place in the world where they are getting close?

I think it's being tried elsewhere. I find that in addition to physicians wanting to help infertile couples, there is an awesome power with being able to create life and that is very appealing and dramatic to people, even beyond the money. Some scientists in South Korea announced that they had cloned a human embryo but didn't allow it go any further. While a number of countries have signed on to an international ban, South Korea hasn't and the United States hasn't either.

Next page | Should we clone Michael Jordan?