单选题 CHICAGO-The fact that an obscure scientist could become an instant media celebrity by announcing he was ready to create a human clone shows the degree to which the issue fascinates and scares humankind, experts said last week.
"It's not a fear of science but of how to control the technology-" and that goes back in fiction to Frankenstein," said Anne Figert, a professor in the anthropology and sociology department at Loyola University of Chicago.
"We weren't upset about (cloning) animals," she added. "It's the same reason we're concerned about abortion or using reproductive technologies. Twenty years ago it was test tube babies-it treads so closely to human life itself."
The idea also has an irresistible pull because it touches on a central theme throughout civilization: The search for immortality, added Kenneth Howard, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University in Chicago.
But those searching for a fountain of youth, he said, overlook the fact that the human duplicate would return as an infant.
"Everyone seems to believe that you'd just be a younger version of who you are today and could use all your experience and shape your life because you now know better," Howard said. "But the reality is that you'd go through another life and it wouldn't be you."
Richard Seed, a Harvard-educated physicist, reignited the debate that began last year when researchers in Scotland cloned a sheep named Dolly by saying he was ready to do the same to a human. It could happen, he said, within 18 months provided he can get financial backing, with his first service being cloned babies for infertile couples.
Within hours Seed was condemned by the White House and attacked in the US Congress. He also rode a wave of media publicity that put him on ABC-TV's "Nightline" last week where he even offered to clone host Ted Koppel.
The University of Illinois at Chicago said the 69-year-old Seed had used space there for three years to do small-scale experiments on the immune systems of mice. His space had neither a desk nor a file cabinet.
A university spokesman said Seed had published more than 20 scientific papers including a 1994 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He was also involved in human embryo transplant research 20 years ago.
The Chicago Tribune reported that he is broke, and was evicted from a home last July after the bank foreclosed on a US