Unit 74
Will We Follow Dolly, the Sheep?
Hearing Scottish scientists' success in cloning a sheep from a single adult cell, the world cones to an unsettling realization: the science is the easy part. it's not that the breakthrough was not decades in the making. It's that once you figured out how to transfer the genes from an adult cell into a living ovum and keep the fragile embryo alive throughout gestation -- most of your basic biological work was finished. The social and philosophical tremors it triggers, however, have merely begun. How will the new technology be regulated? What does the sudden ability to make carbon copies of ourselves say about the concept of individuality? Or is there something about the individual that is lost when the mystical act of conceiving a person becomes standardized into a mere act of photocopying one?
Of all the reasons for using the new technology, pure ego raises the most hackles. The Pharaohs built their pyramids, the Emperors built Rome, and Napoleon built his Arc de Triomphe -- all, at least in part, to make the permanence of stone compensate for the impermanence of the flesh. But big buildings and big tombs would be a poor second choice if the flesh could be made to go on forever. Now it appears, it can. However, it's one thing to want to be remembered after you are gone; it's quite another to manufacture a living monument to ensure that you are. Some observers claim to be shocked that anyone would contemplate such a thing. But that's naive. It's obvious that a lot of people would be eager to clone themselves. Especially those who think the world could use more of them; people who are so arrogant that they have no qualms about bestowing their inner life on a dozen members of the next generations; people, in short, with high self-esteem. It's a horrible crime to make a Xerox of someone. It amounts to putting a human into a genetic straitjacket.
More acceptable than the ego clone is the medical clone, a baby created to provide transplant material for the original. Nobody advocates harvesting a one-of-a-kind organ like a heart from the new child -- an act that would amount to creating the clone just to kill it. But it's hard to argue against the idea of a family's loving child so much that it will happily raise another, identical child so one of its kidneys or a bit of its marrow might allow the first to live.
The problem is that once you start shading the cloning question -- giving an ethical OK to one and a thumbs-down to another -- you are beginning making a mess of things. Suppose you could show that the baby who was created to provide marrow would forever be treated like a second-class child -- well cared for, perhaps, but not well loved. Richard McCormick, a Jesuit Priest, says, "I can't think of a morally acceptable reason to clone a human being."
In a culture in which not everyone sees things so straightforwardly, however, some ethical compromises are going to be reached. How it will be done is anything but clear. Science is close to crossing some horrific boundaries. Hare is an opportunity for human beings to decide if we're simply standing in the path of the technological steamroller of take control and help guide its direction.
It will be up o science to determine if human cloning can be done. It is up to the rest of us to determine if it should be. |