But what about cloning a complete human being? This prospect seems to cause the greatest unease among bioethicists and the general public, but it's not clear exactly why. A clone would be a delayed identical twin of the person from whom the cell's nucleus was taken. A clone is therefore a human being with all of the rights and responsibilities of any other human being. "How could we expect God to treat anyone born through cloning any different from the rest of us?" asks Ted Peters, a fellow at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences and a professor at Pacific Lutheran Seminary. "Surely, they would be just as much a child of God and loved by God. They would have their individuality, they would have their dignity, and certainly they would have their own souls."
The National Bioethics Advisory Commission suggested that human cloning be banned for three to five years on the grounds that it is not yet "safe" for the children who might be born using the procedure. The commission based its decision on the fact that Dolly was born after 277 attempts, which it argued is too high a failure rate when applied to human cloning. But is it really?
Lee Silver notes that hundreds of human eggs and embryos were used before the birth of the first test-tube baby, Louise Joy Brown, in 1978. Dolly was actually the beneficiary of well-established human in vitro fertilization technology: In the 277 tries, only 29 of the fused udder cells actually became embryos, which were implanted in 13 ewes, of which one became pregnant and gave birth. In a sense, this was a perfect success rate, since the only pregnancy resulted in a healthy birth. It is certainly far superior to the success rates achieved in early human IVF efforts. Silver claims that reproductive human cloning is no more dangerous than current human IVF procedures, which result in fewer birth defects than do natural births. An estimated 150,000 test-tube babies have been born worldwide.
Many of the same bioethicists who decried test-tube babies, including Leon Kass of the University of Chicago and Daniel Callahan of the Hastings Institute, are in the forefront of the attempts to ban human cloning. Twenty years ago, these bioluddites portentously warned that test-tube babies would break the natural bonds of family, with unimaginable consequences for society. Although their warnings have proven unjustified, the naysayers are dusting off the old arguments and applying them to this new advance.
The National Bioethics Advisory Commission correctly refused to take a stand on the morality of human cloning, noting our society's diversity of values. The pope is free to advise Roman Catholics about what he believes the proper way to reproduce is, but his values are not universal.
The commission could not find a secular basis for banning the cloning of human beings. After all, who would be hurt by cloning? The person being cloned? Not if he gives permission. The baby? There is little reason to believe that "unnatural" methods of reproduction are any more harmful to offspring than the usual way of having children. There is no evidence, for example, that test-tube babies suffer especially high rates of physical or psychological problems.
Try this thought experiment. If tomorrow someone could prove that you were a clone, would you think your life was worth less, that your loves and experiences were devalued? You would be the same person you always were. Nothing would be different simply because you were born from a "previously experienced genome," in the tortured language of the cloning prohibitionists. A clone would likely have no more issues about self-worth and life chances than test-tube babies or adopted children do today.
One often hears that cloning will bring on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. But that is nonsense. Huxley's dystopia was a centrally planned world in which clones were created by the state. In our society, choices will and should be made by individuals who are helping their children have a better life. One day, cloning technology probably will make possible changes in the genomes of embryos. Parents who risk having children with genetic diseases will be able to have the DNA of their prospective children repaired at the embryo stage, protecting them against maladies such as cystic fibrosis, PKU, and Tay-Sachs. A further benefit is that their grandchildren will never contract these diseases.
Parents will not only be able to prevent disease, they may also be able to enhance their children. Parents invest a lot of time, money, and emotional energy in providing good health care and a solid education for their children. If, by tweaking a base pair or two in a child's DNA, parents could boost the kid's intelligence and ensure against genetic diseases, what's so wrong with that? More to the point, who has the right to stop them?
"We control all other aspects of our children's lives and identities through powerful social and environmental influences and, in some cases, with the use of powerful drugs like Ritalin and Prozac," notes Silver. "On what basis can we reject positive genetic influences on a person's essence when we accept the rights of parents to benefit their children in every other way?"
Opponents of cloning talk a lot about hubris. But it takes more than a little hubris to believe you are wise enough to tell other people what is best for them--which is, after all, what a ban on cloning amounts to. What about the human consequences of banning a technology--the death, disease, disability, indignity, unhappiness, and blighted lives that would result from imposing limits on cloning discoveries and advances? Trying to exercise prior restraint on scientific and medical research is fraught with moral peril. Cloning prohibitionists must be held responsible for preventing the discovery of a cure for AIDS, cancer, Tays-Sachs, or heart disease. Their efforts to ban cloning could stop the creation of new medicines that would help millions of people.
Some opponents of cloning say it is too risky. But what opponents of a new technology regard as too risky may be acceptable for others. After all, some people parachute out of airplanes, while others won't even ride jetliners. "Risk" is not an objective quality of an object or technology; it is inextricably tied up with one's values. Why should cloning opponents get to impose their values on sick or dying people?
With regard to the perennial argument that cloning might violate "human dignity," bioethicist Ruth Macklin of Albert Einstein Medical College rightly observes that people who are worried about this issue "owe us a more precise account of just what constitutes a violation of human dignity if no one's rights are violated. Dignity is a fuzzy concept and appeals to dignity are often used to substitute for empirical evidence that is lacking or sound arguments that cannot be mustered." After all, what is so dignified about dying of cystic fibrosis, diabetes, or cancer?
Unfortunately, Silver mars his otherwise excellent book with a futuristic horror story of his own. He suggests that a few centuries from now, there will be a gap between the gene-enhanced and the non-gene-enhanced. The rich will have taken advantage of the new cloning technologies, so their children will be smarter and free of disease, while the children of poor people will still suffer from the random draws of the natural genetic lottery, since their parents could not afford the new genetic treatments.
This is probably nonsense. Silver is assuming that the new treatments will always be expensive and that poor people will remain about as poor as they are today. More likely, the cost of genetic treatments will drop substantially, and poor people in the future will be much richer than poor people today are, so they will easily take advantage of the new medical technologies. For that matter, why not posit a future in which health insurance companies pay prospective parents to take advantage of genetic treatments and thereby avoid costly and painful medical procedures for their children later in life? That's more plausible than Silver's genetic class-warfare scenario.
Twenty-five years ago, bioluddites tried to stop recombinant DNA research, the technique which allows scientists to swap genes from one organism to another. Today Nobel laureate James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, is worried about the new assault on biotechnological progress. "Ever since we achieved a breakthrough in the area of recombinant DNA in 1973, left-wing nuts and environmental kooks have been screaming that we will create some kind of Frankenstein bug or Andromeda strain that will destroy us all," Watson tells Kolata. "Now we are threatened with a truly imbecilic law that could set back research for years." Kolata notes that "the transformation of recombinant DNA from the greatest threat since the atom bomb to a tool for the pharmaceutical industry occurred with little comment."
"Human essence came into existence simply because those with it could out-compete and kill those without it," writes Silver. "But if human minds have the ability to contemplate and direct changes in the copies of their own genomes that they give to future generations, the human mind is much more than the genes that brought it into existence." Let's hope that humanity will not shrink from using this promising new brainchild, continuing what Francis Bacon called "the conquest of nature for the relief of man's estate."
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