The successful cloning of mice reported in the July 23, 1998 issue of Nature merited front page headline coverage in the New York Times because it signaled how rapidly viable human cloning is advancing.

"Mice are mammals, like humans, and have almost every gene that a person has," New York Times' Gina Kolata explains in her book, Clone: The Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead (p.123), "a mouse, in fact, is essentially a human with its genes rearranged."

"Mice, for unknown reasons," Kolata notes later, "seem to be much harder to clone than sheep or cows or other large animals."

"In cloning mice," Dr. Yanagimachi and Dr. Wakayama defied conventional wisdom among biologists," who had long contended that mice would be perhaps the one mammal that was impossible to clone because of the extraordinarily rapid development of the mouse embryo just after fertilization."

The New York Times report, treading cautiously, did not directly point out that cloning mice was considered much more difficult than cloning human beings. While the cloning of a sheep like "Dolly" was deemed a much easier undertaking.

Indeed, the Times report left it to Princeton University's Dr. Lee Silver, author of Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World reviewed among GayToday's series of groundbreaking stories on cloning (see Archives) to state the obvious.

The implications of the work are clear, Dr. Silver declared: "Absolutely, we're going to have cloning of humans!"

"If we follow scientific protocol, it could take 5 to 10 years before in vitro fertilization clinics add cloning to their repertoires."

Such news was certainly welcomed by an infertile couple, members of Resolve, and California's pro-cloning reproductive-rights activist Mark Eibert, all of whom had been featured on CBS's nationally-broadcast "Morning" show earlier in the day.

The couple had poignantly made clear that cloning alone offered them the means to have children, all other technologies having failed.

Attorney Eibert argued the decision to access reproductive cloning technology was a constitutional reproductive right and that he was considering challenging California's anti-cloning statute.

The CBS report, several weeks in the making, was balanced, factual and sympathetic to the plight of the infertile couples.

It was the first time a major network had handled a news story involving human cloning in an evenhanded, fair, non-hysterical fashion.

The New York Times story goes on to quote a few scientists who still doubt the growing number of reports on the successful cloning of sheep, cows and mice—and others heralding these breakthroughs.

Indeed, a novice reader might feel the esteemed "newspaper of record" and other media are prone to skepticism.

An eminent scientist, Dr. Karl Illmensee, had published a paper in a leading science journal, Cell, claiming to have cloned 3 mice.

For several years he was the star of both professional meetings and the popular press. But, as time passed And others were unable to duplicate his work, questions arose and he was officially charged with falsifying his results.

Although, ultimately acquitted of that charge—but accused of keeping sloppy records, etc., Dr. Illmensee fell into quasi-disrepute.

Ironically, the debate still rages as to whether he did, in fact, by a stroke of luck succeed in doing what he had claimed.

Dr. Davor Solter, his most vocal critic, published a paper in Science, December, 1984, documenting that after years of effort he was unable to repeat Illmensee's cloning experiment.

"But it was the last phrase of the last line of Solter's paper in Science that reverberated through the halls of academe," Kolata emphasizes in Clone, "He wrote 'the cloning of mammals by simple nuclear transfer is biologically impossible."

Solter's conclusion was accepted as "fact." For years, funding for research into cloning was marginalized and almost impossible to obtain.

While molecular biologists focussed on genetic engineering, work on cloning was relegated to those scientists working on barnyard animals in agricultural departments.

It was no small irony that Ian Wilmut, who first cloned "Dolly", was virtually unknown to the higher echelons of world-renowned researchers in molecular biology.

The "cloners" in the barnyards had accomplished what the experts in the ivory towers truly (but falsely) believed could not be done.

Randolfe Wicker is the founder of Clone Rights United Front, the world's first pro-human cloning activist organization, located at 506 Hudson Street, New York, New York, 10014. (212) 929-3632