Randolfe Wicker:
The First Human Cloning Activist

The infertile heterosexual community seems to finally be finding its voice. It has been thrilling for me to participate in this new movement in our country. Of course, we homosexuals live our lives, in most cases, in infertile relationships. But we not are hiding a "deep dark secret" from everyone else around us because they are all infertile as well.

We have also commenced getting a valuable network of professional geneticists, physicians, molecular biologists, medical school bioethicists, etc. I am a self-educated citizen activist who, for this brief moment in time, has become "the voice" of the human cloning movement. But a most educated and brilliant team of professionals holds me aloft.

Jack Nichols: I've always felt that we should be prepared for the arrival

of human cloning because, like it or not, its going to happen. Cloned people.

There are many who are fearful about it. Some are actively opposing you.

Who are the principal foes of human cloning and what are some

of the arguments they advance?

Randolfe Wicker: The principal foes of human cloning are religious reactionaries who see "cloning" as human beings playing God. The Catholic Church is the leader of the opposition. However, there are also large numbers of "environmental fundamentalists" who are also involved.

So, you have the traditional political right (Catholic Church, Right-To-Life Protestant fundamentalists) in bed with people generally thought of being part of the traditional left (environmentalists and those other groups who rallied together in Seattle). Like they say, politics makes strange bedfellows.

They generally make arguments like we hear made against homosexuals. Cloning "isn’t natural". In fact it is. Identical twins are naturally occurring clones. Some Geckos and other developed forms of life which usually reproduce sexually when both sexes are available, the females at least, will simply lay eggs that hatch female clones of themselves when stranded on an island without males.

The "playing God" argument is one constant theme. It is interesting that they cling to that so reverently because Dr. Lee Silver points out in his book Remaking Eden , that once humans were able to fertilize a human egg outside of the womb they had "taken control of their own evolution".

People seem to fear science and their fellow human beings so much that they would rather leave everything in God’s (or Mother Nature’s) hands.

There is also a lot of nonsense about a child conceived through cloning having an identity problem, thinking of themselves as a "second somebody else". Others worry what psychological harm might be done to someone who sees their older twin at say, the age of 63, and therefore "knows" exactly what he or she will look like at that age. This "theory of trauma" really gives me a chuckle because I can tell you that as a young man of twenty, I could look at any number of 63-year-olds (my current age, as of today) and "know" (even be traumatized by) what I would look like at this age. I didn’t need to see an aging twin to know the terrible toll age takes on everyone.

Jack Nichols: There have been several articles recently--from Japan,

Australia and now in the USA (Salon) that-- out of the blue-- are emphasizing that

gay males may soon be able to reproduce. You started with this view--although then,

because Dolly was a female-- it seemed only females could be cloned. Then,

because you realized that human cloning is such a volatile issue, you felt

it best not to mention gay issues because human cloning is for all of humanity

and need not be linked to gay issues. How does it make you feel to see the gay

factor re-enter the cloning debate?

Randolfe Wicker: Seeing the "gay issue reinserted into the cloning debate" makes me want to throw up. It isn’t the idea that the issue is being raised. It’s the fact that with the exception of one brave lesbian couple in Baltimore, the debate about "gay reproduction" is being waged totally by heterosexuals.

The "gay establishment" is simply sitting out the debate. Or, worse, subtle suave homophobic writers are using them as unwitting ploys. Let’s look at some of the highlights of the Salon article. The description of me was anything but positive.

It says:

Unofficial spokesman? See the home page of the Human Cloning Foundation who

I am both their CEO and THE official spokesperson. And I haven't mixed the two for over three years. . I've tried to ‘go back into the closet’ for the good of the human cloning movement.

I never argue for the right "to copy" myself. I argue for the right of my unique later-born twin to have his turn at life. I argue not ‘in the name of reproduction’ but as an exercise of my reproductive rights and my religious right to have my genotype live on into another lifetime.

There's been no ‘fork in the path of immortality’. I never advocate cloning as a pathway to true immortality, which is impossibility, since all living things must ultimately die. I see myself ‘living on’ in my later-born twin like many people see themselves living on in their children. I’m delighted that we’ve found ‘options in reproduction that go beyond or around the ‘man and wife’ route. I’ve been cheated in life by nature. My relationships were infertile and barren. I have been demeaned by fertile Christian folk and told my 18-year-long marital relationship was invalid because, among other things, my life mate and I could not bear children. Cloning changes all of that. Praise the Lord and pass me some nuclear transfer!

Now, this Salon article was annoying on many levels and confusing on others. For instance, Felicia Park-Rogers, director of Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere in San Francisco, was described in one sentence as "resolutely opposed to human cloning for reproduction-which she views as an act of pure narcissism (Am I wrong to assume she is calling me a narcissist?)

Then in the next sentence, she is quoted as saying "the bearing of children by way of egg nuclear transfer is a perfectly ethical option for gay and straight parents." This left me a bit confused. Was cloning a "perfectly ethical option" or was it an exercise in "pure narcissism"? I thought it was time to have a chat with Felicia Park-Rogers. Perhaps we could discuss matters a bit. I thought it might be an opportunity for some "consciousness raising".

I called their offices. A woman answered. I’m terrible at names and was hurriedly scanning the Salon article since I’m even worse at hyphenated names when the woman who answered volunteered: "Felicia Park-Rogers? There are only two of us here. Who should I say is calling?"

"Randolfe Wicker from the Human Cloning Foundation." I replied, "I’d like to talk to her about some quotes in the February 1, 2001 Salon article."

"Could you spell that name for me? And what was the name of the organization?" The woman replied as if unsure she had heard either name correctly. I complied.

"I just want to discuss with her some of the issues raised by this article," I continued. "I felt it was basically homophobic in tone. I think we should talk."

"Well," the woman responded, "let me see if she is available". A fairly long silence followed. I wondered about only two people in the office and why "availability" was something not obviously apparent. Perhaps I was having an attack of narcissistic angst.

"I’m sorry’" the woman informed me upon returning to the phone, "she is in a meeting."

It was just so organizationally, so totally, so disgustingly political correct . It reminded me of the Human Rights Campaign Fund which dodged the issue of human cloning as a means of same sex reproduction when queried by a reporter for Genre magazine but embraced Republican Senator Al D’Amato’s bid for reelection. Oh well, I am so glad I left the gay movement when I did. We stood for something years ago.

I would urge readers to see the Salon article and its discussion about the possibility of having male eggs fertilized by male sperm so a child might be born with two fathers and mixed DNA.

Of course, the bioethicists were there worrying that there might be a "loophole" in British law that might allow such a thing to happen and fretting : "Would society accept such motherless children?" ( I would hope so.)

Salon’s homophobic touches were masterfully done. A "gay friend of mine" told her his response to the idea of male eggs: "That’s creepy."(No offense here, of course, because the author has a gay friend and he’s the one saying it is creepy.)

We learn that he really supports the idea because he’s for reproductive freedom but was "not determined to have children of his own genetic makeup and views adoption or surrogacy as perfectly suitable alternatives".

Obviously, he was a typical young gay male who was probably much more focused on who would be at the club Saturday night than he was on the idea of spending the next twenty-five years raising the cast-off unwanted child of a heterosexual tryst.

To her credit, when push came to shove in the article, Parke-Rogers at least saw that "any time we’re looking at new ways to reproduce, we need to look at what’s (ethically) best for families and children. So I would hate to see homophobic discrimination take part in blocking this in any way." (Gosh! Golly gee! There might be some hope for these folks yet.)

Actually, the debate about conceiving a child with the mixed genes of two male parents commenced with the announcement by a British scientist that it was a "future possibility".

A human egg would have its nucleus replaced with the nucleus of a sperm, thereby creating a "male egg" which could then be fertilized by the sperm of another male to produce a child.

All of this was speculative, of course, and huge obstacles needed to be overcome. The most significant problem was with something called "imprinting". The 23 pairs of male and female chromosomes complimented each other and blended together like two sides of a zipper. Two sets of male chromosomes would not compliment each other in this fashion.

For that reason I had viewed the concept of all male reproduction as somewhere between "future scientific possibility" and "science fiction". Such "imprinting problems" were of no concern to most major gay news organizations. They eagerly embraced the concept of all male parenting and ran glowing accounts about its possibility.

The Salon article noted that "this could be done with the DNA of two female eggs as well". Contemplating male sperm fertilizing a male egg was complicated enough. How one female egg might fertilize another baffled me. This was a "question" for someone with a better understanding of genetics than myself.

Fortunately, I have among my growing network of professionals, Dr. Hunter O’Reilly. who has a doctorate in genetics, ran a banner supporting The Human Cloning Foundation at the bottom of her own website http://www.ArtByHunter.com and even wore ‘Yes to Human Cloning" buttons to lectures and exhibitions of her art exhibitions which creatively used scientific imagery.

"I’ll forward this piece of nonsense (in my opinion) to you. (the Salon article) I wonder about the allegation of ‘egg-egg fertilization’?" I’d emailed her.

"Allegation makes it sound so negative," Dr. O’Reilly responded, making me feel like a male version of Felica Park-Rogers. "I actually thought of this possibility and talked about it every so often to people before I ever heard anyone suggest it….I would get some odd confused looks when I mentioned this possibility to people. I think it is an interesting theory, but I am not so sure how practical it is right now."

Well, there is nothing more sobering than to have a real expert tell you when you are wrong. That’s the way your knowledge grows.

"As we know," Dr. O’Reilly continued, "science fiction has become science reality many times…."

"As I am sure you know, women have two X chromosomes which determines their gender as a woman, and men have both an X and a Y chromosome, the Y chromosome determining their gender as a male. With two women having genetic children, you could only have girls. Whereas two men having children could have both boys and girls. If you ever just got two Y chromosomes together, that embryo would not be viable."

See what I mean about having "a most educated and brilliant team of professionals holding me aloft"!

And while we’re exploring the frontier of possibilities, a recent news story said that it would be possible to produce both sperm and eggs from the same stem cell culture. I recall that all of us begin as females in the womb. This latest development would mean that from one person you could produce a stem cell culture that might be able to produce both an egg (which an adult male can’t produce) and sperm.

I discussed this with another physician. If that were to happen and you fertilized the egg with the sperm both of which had the same DNA, would the resulting child be a later-born twin of the original person? Or would this always-random "collision of egg and sperm" possibly produce an entirely new unique individual?

"Good question." My physician friend responded. "I think it might be a little of both."

So, you can see why cloning is such a fascinating "mental adventure". You answer one question and three others arise. It is one of the things that keeps me going.

Jack Nichols: Although The New York Times Magazine initially covered you,

in 1997 and, in fact, ran a bunch of cloned photos of you, they recently

interviewed you but then put their focus on the flying saucerites, the Raelian religious group in Canada, an article that could be called, I suppose, a put-down of cloning. I'd already concluded last year that The New York Times Magazine seems to have been taken over editorially by neo-conservative propagandists, as witness Andrew Sullivan's bylines therein. You've always been a media whiz kid. Do you think so too?

Randolfe Wicker: Yes, Jack the New York Times (Sunday) Magazine ran a cover feature on human cloning in its February 4, 2001 issue The cover spoke volumes. Two little babies sitting on a big green Alien hand with a comic book mantra of multiple titles: "LAB OF THE HUMAN CLONES!" "Parents Seek To Duplicate DEAD CHILD’ "Is this MADNESS?!" "RICH U.F.O. SECT BEHIND SCHEME!" "Scientists say, "IT CAN BE DONE!"

The story focused on the Raelians, a space-cadet cult, who have been out selling cloning to all comers. You might recall that they had a press conference in San Francisco and announced that they could clone a child that shared the DNA of two male or female couples.

Actually, I have been denouncing them as rip-offs. The writer never kept her appointment to interview me but did talk to some supporters’ in the movement. Unlike the WIRED magazine story, this writer really didn’t show how these people were peddling a product that they couldn’t deliver, something that would get anyone but a religious outfit arrested for.

Instead, the writer did focus on a broader and more important aspect of cloning, the way it was becoming a "religion of science" and was "promising immortality through technology" to those who yearned for it.

I think the New York Times Magazine has gone downhill in many ways. It seems especially bad in science. Actually, I should say that its coverage of scientific issues is very uneven. It had a great article about how people can sort sperm to have a daughter or a son as they choose. Then it fell in love with the idea of growing human stem cells in human eggs and living to be 150 years old. (Doubtful science to many.)

This last article was "dead" on delivery. They had gone to press with a feature on a group that weren’t only fraudulent but who had days before publication been totally pushed out of the spotlight by real fertility doctors with facilities and track records who announced the formation of an international consortium of physicians seeking to perfect and achieve cloning reproduction for infertile couples. The Times would not have published this article, in my opinion, if it had been one week later. I am sure that they are embarrassed by it.

Magazines and publications change over time. The New Republic has become ultra-conservative. The Times magazine also seems to have become somewhat retrograde. However, the New York Times itself and its science section is second to none

Jack Nichols: One thing you and I both noticed back in 1997 when you got immediate

attention from mainstream newsmagazines, was how the gay and lesbian press kept altogether mum (except for GayToday and Baltimore's foremost gay newspaper) about what you were saying. For a time, there were three pioneer activists--you first, then Frank Kameny and Ann Northrop--willing to speak out positively about human cloning. I know that you approached Alternative Family Magazine offering an article, and although you surely approve of that magazine's concept, you were disappointed because they were so "Leave it to Beaver," as you said. Do you think the gay press could use some more boldness? What about the national organizations like HRC and NGLTF?

Randolfe Wicker: I am so far beyond caring about what the gay press and organizations like the HRC and the NGLTF say or do these days. I was interviewed by National MSNBC TV two days ago for a spot on Peter Jennings' Evening News. Canadian Public Television is broadcasting a program shortly. I was on Canadian Public radio yesterday. I spent one day last week working with the Japanese Daily, the major newspaper of Japan with a circulation of eight million. I have been delayed this evening because a reporter from Japanese Public Television was here for four hours talking and taking notes.

I am working with Britain’s Channel 4 (a competitor of the BBC) on a continuing basis on several video productions. I have a young filmmaker making a documentary about my life as a cloning activist, as someone who is in the bowels of a new social movement being born. I will be in a segment on 60 Minutes in early March. I am supposed to be picked up on February 5^th to be on Brian Williams’ show on MSNBC which will be rebroadcast on CNBC where I will debate an opponent of human cloning.

I actually think it says something about what is called "the gay press" when a lesbian couple who want to be cloned are more likely to be featured on major national media than they are in their own community newspapers.

I think it is incredible (and disheartening) that Gay Today with its continuing coverage of this issue and my own position as a self-identified gay male (only when necessary and/or pressed these days) causes homosexuality and cloning to come up together in most internet search engines and the "gay establishment" is too nearsighted or self-absorbed to take the seat "at the table" we have secured for them.

I remember the days when "civil rights" debates discussed the discrimination suffered by 30,000 Eskimos and never mentioned the existence of ten or twenty million homosexual Americans. We had no "seat at the table" in the civil rights debates for many years. In the early days, I had to spend considerable time presenting and defending the idea that homosexuals were a "minority group".

Now, we are entering a new age of reproductive possibilities. Science promises to allow all of us to throw off the "scourge of barrenness" which has caused us to be judged as lesser beings and which has been one of the main arguments against recognizing the legitimacy and validity of our relationships.

We are supposed to be a well-organized, wealthy, progressive enlightened and gifted community. Well, that might be the case but, frankly speaking, our leadership sucks.

I am so many light years ahead of them all; I don’t even want to bother looking back. Hopefully, sooner or later they will wake up and catch up.

Jack Nichols: It seems that George W. Bush is in a quandary on one aspect of cloning-- he's asking if human fetal stem cell research should go forward. The fundamentalists oppose it. And yet it promises many great medical advances. What are these advances? And what do you think Mr. Bush will do?

Randolfe Wicker: What George Bush will do about stem cell research is a big unanswered question. He will certainly stop the use of fetal tissue from aborted fetuses being used to help Parkinson’s patients.

However, his choice for heading the National Institutes of Health is both Pro-Life and pro-stem-cell-research. It will be interesting to see what happens when the religious right tries to stop all stem cell research while the centrist money businessmen in the Republican Party want to profit from the scientific advances in drugs and medical treatment that it offers. It will be a very interesting study in what I call "When the rubber hits the road…"

Jack Nichols: We discussed recently how a major TV newsmagazine questioned you about your own religious view. I think the producer realized that you were defending human cloning on the basis of your right to your own 'religious' belief: namely that you have a stake in what you're now calling "partial temporary immortality" the extension of you through your duplicate life-form--your genotype--living beyond your own grave. Say something about that, would you?

Randolfe Wicker: My term "partial temporary immortality" isn’t very popular with many others in the human cloning movement. I’ve taken the same idea, tamed it down a bit and mollified them by saying that "My desire to live on through my later-born twin brother is no different than any parent’s desire to live on through their children". (And I’m giving poor Felicia Park-Rogers a hard time for being something of a mealy mouth?)

Yes, Jack, that old saying is true: "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." You join the "big boys", that small clique of publicly recognized talking-head authorities, and you start talking out of both sides of your mouth like the rest of them.

Yes. Cloning blurs the line between life and death. If my genotype lives on into another lifetime, I will have denied death its traditional totality. That doesn’t mean that "I" live on, just that special formula which is me. That is enough for me. It is a "partial temporary immortality" but look at the term itself and you can see it is an oxymoron.

For those who don’t know the term "oxymoron" (I didn’t for years), it means a self-contradictory concept like saying someone is a brilliant mental retard.

Jack Nichols: As the years have rolled by since Dolly was born, you've been able to see some necessary changes made in the way you present the concept of human cloning. For example, you realized it was impolitic to refer to a cloned-baby

as a clone, that it detracts from the humanity of the child. What are a few other such

strategic realizations you've had?

Randolfe Wicker: Yes, I object to the term "clone" because it is a dehumanizing word. It brings to mind, not human beings or little children but robot-like subhuman zombies. It is interesting how every "debate" develops its own "terminology".

For instance, we early gay activists used to say we were fighting for "civil rights for homosexuals". But that was a big long awkward phase. With Stonewall, that cry was changed to the verbally easier cry for "gay rights".

I am still trying to figure out what right is specifically "gay"? To be safe on the streets and in your home? To be secure in your employment? To not be discriminated against? How do any of those "rights" stop being "civil" and become "gay"? I’ve never figured that one out. However, the Religious Right has. They say ‘gay rights’ are ‘special rights’. I think we made a blunder there.

Likewise, in the cloning debate, whenever someone uses the term "replication", you can be sure that they are anti-cloning. Even the word has a certain moral cadence to it.

Remember in the documentary Tongues Untied (about black gay males) the scene in which you just saw the preacher’s mouth as it rolled and curled up and spat out the charge that "homosexuality was an abomination". The linguistic cadence of "abomination" is extraordinarily similar to that of "replication".

Cloning is "reproduction" because it is the passing on of one’s genes to another generation. Replication is like Xeroxing, making exact copies of something that gets fainter and fainter with each copy.

Jack Nichols: You often refer to your unborn twin brother. Now that you're older than

most dads, what if you're no longer around to care for him?

Randolfe Wicker: What if I am not around to care for you unborn twin brother? I never intended to raise him myself. At best I would just be a "special uncle" in the family, someone who would have a special bond and understanding for how he thinks and feels. I had a "special aunt" in my own family who was like that and we weren’t even ‘clones’.

I’d provide support for education and such. I wouldn’t discriminate against gay couples but I would probably choose a heterosexual couple who had gay relatives and were comfortable with my later-born twin’s being either homosexual or heterosexual.

I am convinced, 85% or more so, that he will in fact be heterosexual. Why? Well, to begin with the odds of an identical twin being gay if the other is gay are only 50-50.

The circumstances of my birth were somewhat unusual. My mother had a very difficult delivery that went on for many hours. Because of this, a large water bubble developed on the top of my head. My head was nearly as large as my body. They told my mother that I was a normal and healthy child but wouldn’t show me to her for two days after birth.

Finally, when my mother became insistent and demanded:" Why are you hiding my child from me? He must have died. Why won’t you let me see him?" They relented. A nurse placed a napkin over the top of my head to hide its size but at the moment the nurse presented me to my mother, the napkin fell off. My mother shrieked in horror. She thought she had given birth to a Mongolian Idiot.

They assured both my parents that I was normal. They said the water bubble would disappear within thirty days. It took nearly a year. My mother described to me how "Your father always had faith in you. We would walk around the room and your father would say,’ See how his eyes follow us. He’s OK ‘

I’m a genes-are-destiny type person. However, given the rejection by my mother at birth, plus the fact that she couldn’t nurse me because she had ‘inverted nipples’, leads me to think that perhaps I didn’t have a heterosexually-inspiring-bonding with the opposite sex at birth like most men do

Actually, that isn’t an issue with me. I do find it amusing how writer’s like Lori Andrews choose to print only the first part of my comment on what it would be like to watch my later-born twin grow up to be heterosexual, get happily married and have the family I always dreamed of as a child.

'Perhaps,' I would say to myself: 'Gosh, I really missed out on a big thing in life by not being straight and having a wife and kids.’ "

This always gets quoted but the second part of what I've say has yet to see print anywhere. I say:

"On the other hand, if my later-born twin married a harridan who made his life miserable and had hideous unruly kids, I’d probably slap myself on the head, give a sigh of relief and declare, 'Thank God I was gay!' "

Jack Nichols: Thank you Randy, as always, for continuing to be a bold adventurer, pioneering an unusual path where, no doubt, you've seen a special human need that others haven't. If your later-born twin had a harridan wife and unruly children that drove him mad, you'd say thank God you're gay? Hmmm. Well, we'll end on that highly spiritual note.