Ian Wilmut's 'THE SECOND CREATION'


Posted by Randolfe Wicker ® , Thu, Dec 07, 2000, 20:16:19 Post Reply   Forum
I am a real "cloning fanatic" but I found "The Second Creation" so scientifically heavy that I felt I was taking Biology #16. It is more of a textbook than something one can read and enjoy.
And the editorial bias regarding human cloning in the last couple chapters is just loathsome. Wilmut and Company are "totally opposed". Of course, one wonders how opposed Wilmut can be when he announced in a "since removed" news story that he had no qualms whatsoever going to work full time with Geron Corporation back in January 1999 cloning human embryos to be used to create human stem cell cultures.
Ian Wilmut is a classic study in the contradicitions involved when you have a plodding scientist discover something which is so profound that even he does not understand its full implications.
Reading "Remaking Eden", "The Road to Dolly", "Re:Creating Medicine", "Twins", "Entwined Lives", "Controlling Human Heredity" (by Diane Paul) and even Lori Andrews' anti-cloning history of the fertility industry, "The Clone Age" are more informative and useful than wading through this bog of boring technicality. This book would have never been published if Ian Wilmut had not achieved such fame. This book is so boring and will be such a slow seller, he will probably never have another one published--even with the lively ghost writer who tells us all about it in that stuffy (not quite witty) prose.


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