| Home -> March 1997 -> Clone This. |
What a hot topic, huh? It's been discussed on talk shows, op-ed columns and late-night monologues. Andy Rooney talked about it on "60 Minutes", and even Sportscenter did a piece last night. The issue is as ubiquitous as the O.J. Simpson criminal trial decision, though not as decisive, and certainly not along such clear lines.
The O.J. divide generally followed race lines in the U.S. As Chris Rock put it, "Black people too happy; white people too mad." Not so here. Not many have advocated cloning humans, and popular opinion has not crystalized in any way but uniformly.
I think that will change.
So far, most of the discussion has been roughly the same. They bring up "moral and ethical decisions", never really delineate what those might be; claim people will ignore them anyway, typically using the atomic bomb as empirical evidence; then discuss the quandry of who should be cloned, and the inherent evil in the answer to that question.
The real issue that arises here is one so potentially devisive, so seditionary to our society, that in all the letters-to-the-editors and discussion panels, no one will even broach the matter.
Artificial imnsemination may have made the penis obsolete, but the testes were still free from competition. No longer. All that is needed is some healthy cells with the full genotype, and people can make more people. More accurately, women can make more people. The debate over this reproductive choice will absolutely dwarf the abortion issue.
Within the coming years, a grocery list of animals will be cloned in the same manner that Dolly was. Eugenics, Twenty-First century style: all the desired qualities without the destructive recessive traits. Then research groups will take the time to design custome genomes. We'll take this sheep's immune system, and combine it with this one's coat to make super-ewe.
It will be feasible to do this with Homo sapiens as well. Research like the human genome project will make it even easier than sheep, or chickens, or cows.
Imagine the first woman who decides she has not met the right man to father her child, and may never meet that man. She agrees to work with a team of Swiss experts on a new research project. They start with the DNA of a respected noble laureate, then manipulate the parts of the genome they understand more than intelligence: hair color, eye pigmentation, expected weight and height, and, of course, sex. She carries this new genotype to term and delivers a healthy child.
Imagine the furor over that birthday.
If you have trouble believing that would spark controversy, please note the word sperm was not used in the above paragraph. Now imagine that the first woman to embark on this course is a lesbian, and the DNA comes from her noble laureate lover and long-term partner. What do you think? Any controversy now?
Instead of this, however, the rhetoric spouted today can't get past the 1940s. Nazis and the atomic bomb. Are we incapable of extrapolating cloning to today, and specifically to reproductive freedoms? Perhaps. Maybe the average columnist so poorly understands the science that they cannot venture into the abstract.
I doubt it though. I just think the Nazis and atomic bomb are easier to talk about because we have faced them before, and we know they are wrong. The boogeyman of cloning, however, is more uncertain, and so much more terrifying. Because it may not be the the same monster, and it may not be completely evil either.
3 March 1997
Rant Back!