What's New in Life Science Research

A little over a century ago, in 1903, Herbert J. Webber, a plant breeder at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was frustrated that he didn't have a word to describe "those plants that are propagated vegetatively by buds, grafts, cuttings, suckers, runners, slips, bulbs, tubers, etc." (Webber, 1903, p. 502).

Given rapid developments in plant breeding, spurred by the expansion of large-scale crop agriculture, Webber saw an urgent need for a neologism.

Although he was generally opposed to deriving terms from Greek and Latin, a practice he believed burdened words with heavy philological baggage, Webber chose "clon." From a Greek term meaning twig, spray, or slip, broken off for the purposes of propagation, "clon," met Webber's criteria of being short, euphonious, phonetically spelled, easily pronounced, and unlike any other word being used in the English language.

Perhaps we are lucky he chose this term. The other contenders were 'strace' -- a combination of strain and race -- and the Greek terms clados and clema, which Webber deemed too clumsy.

Two years later, for phonetic reasons, an "e" was added to the end of "clon," which had already been accepted by the Association of Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations.

Thus was born "clone."

For the following six decades, the term appeared fairly regularly in reference to plant breeding and agriculture.

It wasn't until the 1960s, however, that clone began to assume the powerful, sometimes creepy, sometimes mythical, connotations associated with it today.

One of the first scientists to introduce clones and cloning in relation to humans was the geneticist Joshua Lederberg (1925-2008). A brilliant scientific visionary who pioneered the field of bacterial genetics and coined the term exobiology (the study of the possibility of alien life), Lederberg pondered the possibilities of what he called "clonality" in a 1966 article in The American Naturalist.

Surveying the brave new world of emergent molecular biology and fully aware he was living at the cusp of a bioinformatic and genomic revolution, Lederberg foresaw the development of nuclear transplantation or transfer for higher species animals. Retaining an inquisitive optimism about experimental human biology, he nonetheless warned about the ramifications of human cloning, including the likely narcissism of those who would want to reproduce themselves in a narrow-minded and exclusionary fashion akin to the unsavory and naïve eugenicists of the past.

Within a few years, and propelled by the social and ethical inquiry that so concerned Lederberg, clone - and its variants - jumped from the scientific into the popular literature. One of the primary catalysts of this trend was Future Shock, the best-selling bok published in 1970. Written by educator and iconoclast Alvin Toffler, Future Shock included clones as one disturbing and crucial facet, among many, of a hyper-accelerated world in which rapidly developing technologies were throwing humans off kilter and perhaps even setting us down a path of permanent destruction.

Set loose into the popular imagination, the prospect of human clones reinforced pre-existing fears about strange laboratory experiments, test tube creatures, and the eeriness of serial production and sameness. Against the 1960s mantra of "question authority," and hostility towards medical paternalism, the military-industrial complex, and the psychiatric strait-jacket, it is not surprising that the clone became a symbol of social normalization, anti-individualism, and technoscience gone amuck (see Mike's post on fears about cloned evil genius storm troopers). By the 1980s, clone, now drawn into controversies over the ontological beginning of life and fetal personhood, which revved up as part of the abortion wars, had long since lost its original linguistic innocence.

References

Joshua Lederberg. (1966). Experimental Genetics and Human Evolution. The American Naturalist 100, 915, pp. 519-531.

Alvin Toffler. (1970). Future Shock. New York: Random House.

Herbert J. Webber (1903, October 16). New Horticultural and Agricultural Terms. Science, New Series 18, 459, pp. 501-503.