The Cloning of Margaret Fanger

In 1966 Margaret Fanger, the founder of Canned Parenthood, died. In January 1999 a secret investigative team claimed to have uncovered evidence indicating that shortly after her death the Board of Canned Parenthood voted, behind closed doors, to allocate 25 percent of its funding to clone Ms. Fanger’s frozen cells. The investigators asserted that a technology, called Chromosomal Universal Mixing, had been secretly refined over the past 20 to 30 years, yielding a procedure that involves transferring the genetic identity of a desired cell to the plasma of a histocompatible host cell. This technology presumably preserves the genetic make-up of the desired cell by employing a host cell to perform the normal metabolic activities for the desired cell.

The investigators contended that Canned Parenthood circumvented U.S. restrictions on cloning by employing the expertise of a clinic in Paraguay run by a German-born doctor. The investigators then turned over their findings to, of all people, Cardinal Logicus in the Vatican. In the summer of 1999, Logicus spoke out about the research, making the astounding claim that Fanger’s cells were found to be histocompatible with those of Adolf Zitler, the deceased German racist. The result was a media blitzkrieg against Logicus. For example, the respected magazine, Sleezeweek, called the Cardinal “a senile crank.”

Last month Canned Parenthood announced that the cloning of Margaret Fanger had indeed succeeded, and yesterday a hundred thousand people gathered in a stadium in Munich, Germany, waiting in awed silence to meet the world’s first human clone.

What follows is my report from Munich: