In 2003, They Secretly Cloned Mozart

Jonathan Rauch | August 18, 2001

"House Backs Ban on Human Cloning for Any Objective" --The New York Times, August 1, 2001

"Despite Warnings, 3 Vow to Go Ahead on Human Cloning; Secrecy of Separate Endeavors Makes It Difficult to Gauge How Realistic They Are" --The New York Times, August 8, 2001

I'll tell you a strange story. Okay, it sounds screwy, but I checked it out a little, and I think this guy was on the level. He used to come into the bar a couple of years back, just now and then, not too regular. Pretty young, but he had that saggy look, like too many years of wife trouble or something. I see a lot of them like that.

So it's Christmas Eve 2040, and I'm the only bartender still working that afternoon, and the house is practically empty. I see this guy down at the end of the bar, sitting by himself. He's looking even more saggy than usual, and I think, "What the heck--it's Christmas." I bring him a fresh drink, on the house, and wish him greetings of the season. He says thanks, but doesn't smile and barely looks up. So I start drying the glasses--they're dry already, but the customers don't talk if you look too interested--and ask him, casual-like, if there's something particular on his mind.

Now he looks at me, sort of funny, and says: "Do you know who I am?"

Reddish-brown hair, sharp nose with a prominent arch, weak chin, chubby cheeks. I try to remember if I've seen him on TV or something.

"Are you the guy who rides around on that goat in those used-car commercials and says, `I promise you, this ain't no bull'? Man, I love those commercials."

He groans.

"Here, maybe this will help," he says, and he pulls a little picture out of his wallet. An old portrait, really old, like centuries old. Looks like it was cut out of an encyclopedia. It's a young man in profile: sharp nose, weak chin, definite resemblance to my sad friend here. At the bottom, there's a caption: "W.A. Mozart."

Now it's my turn to look at him funny. Then it hits me like a brick. "You're that clone guy," I say. "The guy in the papers back in the '20s."

Finally, he smiles a little. "In the flesh. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I have his brain, his heart, his DNA. He's my father and my mother and my brother. He's my identical twin, except I was born 247 years later."

By now I'm not even pretending I'm not interested, so he starts talking. It takes him a long time to explain, and I didn't get it all, but I got a lot, and some of the rest I filled in later from the newspapers.

In 2001, Congress passed a ban on cloning humans, but of course your cults and fruitcakes and mad scientists went ahead with secret cloning as best they could. Mostly they failed, but there were always stories surfacing in the tabloids about how this or that attempt had succeeded. It was hard to be sure what to believe, because most of the claims were bogus, and anyone who might really have made a clone destroyed the evidence to avoid a long holiday in Sing Sing.

Anyway, there was this software billionaire with a passion for music. He was nuts about Mozart, and he was especially nuts about Mozart's Requiem. That was Mozart's last piece, commissioned anonymously by a count who planned to pass it off as his own. Mozart died before he could finish the Requiem, but what he left behind was the first half of one of the greatest masterpieces of all time. Ever since then, people have been trying to complete it, starting with a version by one of Mozart's students. No one could approach the original.

Well, this billionaire put his hands on some of Mozart's remains or something, which he bought from some Czech family. He set up a secret institute in Switzerland and hired some top biologists and swore them to silence. He told them they'd get $1 million each for every baby they cloned from Mozart's DNA. And he told them that once the Mozarts were 18, he'd pay $10 million to each clone for a finished Requiem.