The Paradox of cloning
WILSON, JAMES Q.
The Paradox of Cloning By James Q. Wilson Let us suppose that it becomes possible to clone human beings. The creation of Dolly the cloned sheep makes this more likely than anyone once suspected....
...But even if such bills pass, the argument will be far from over...
...We know that the environment will have some effect on each twin's personality, but it is easy to overestimate this...
...The central question facing those who approach cloning with an open mind is whether the gains from human cloning—a remedy for infertility and substitute for adoption—are worth the risks of farming organs, propagating dictators, and impeding evolution...
...There are both philosophical and utilitarian objections to cloning...
...This is less far-fetched...
...Of course an unmarried or unscrupulous person eager for a cloned offspring may travel from the United States to a place where there are no restrictions of the sort I suggest...
...We already have a kind of clone: identical twins...
...They could secure a specific genetic product, but they could not obtain what they might think is the ideal product...
...There is, I think, a natural sentiment that is James Q. Wilson is Collins professor of management and public policy at UCLA and the author, most recently, of MoralJudg-ment (Basic Books...
...Congress may regulate or even block cloning research in the United States, but other countries are free to pursue their own strategies...
...There is, in short, no way that American law can produce a fail-safe restraint on undesirable cloning...
...One set of those problems requires us to imagine scientists' cloning children in order to harvest organs and body parts or producing for later use many Adolf Hitlers or Saddam Husseins...
...There may be parents who, out of fear or ideology, can be persuaded to accept a clone of a Hussein in hopes that they can help produce an unending chain of vicious leaders...
...But under what circumstances will such abuses occur...
...It produces an offspring that gets roughly half of its genes from its father and half from its mother, but the mixture occurs in unpredictable and fascinating combinations...
...We can ban a risky but useful drug, but the only effect is to limit its use to those who are willing and able to pay the airfare to Hong Kong...
...many may give blood...
...The task of moving from one sheep to many sheep, and from sheep to other animals, and from animals to humans, will be long and difficult...
...I am struck by how many scientists interested in cloning have reflexively adopted the view that the environment will have a powerful effect on a cloned child...
...Aware of the value of genetic research, several members of Congress have expressed reservations about quick legislative action...
...Today, it is generally accepted, and for good reason...
...When we hear a beautiful model say that she would like to have a clone of herself, we are puzzled...
...Suppose we wish to have children with a high IQ, an athletic physique, easily tanned skin, or freedom from a particular genetic disease...
...The first is that cloning violates God's will by creating an infant in a way that does not depend on human sexual congress or make possible the divine inculcation of a soul...
...Cloning creates the opportunity for people to maximize a valued trait...
...From the work of Dr...
...Science supplies what one or both human bodies lack, namely, a reasonable chance to produce an infant...
...Cloning humans, if it can occur at all, cannot be prevented, but cloning unmarried persons will expand the greatest cultural problem our country now faces...
...traits that now are unappealing may become essential for human survival in the centuries ahead...
...Do I want another man like the father, who is smart and earns a lot—but whose hair is receding, who has diabetes, and who is so obsessed with work that he is not much fun on weekends...
...The conditions are those to which I have already referred...
...let me set aside discussion of this matter for another occasion...
...That is true, but so does in vitro fertilization...
...After all, they have already created poison gas and conducted grisly experiments on prisoners of war and concentration-camp inmates...
...This problem is one for which there is no obvious individual solution...
...They are genetically identical humans...
...Many parents do not want a child with particular traits...
...The major threat cloning produces is a further weakening of the two-parent family...
...If cloning is to occur, the central problem is to ensure that it be done only for two-parent families who want a child for their own benefit...
...The parental tie is not infallible—infanticide occurs, and some neonates are abandoned in trash bins—but it is powerful and largely independent of the origin of the child...
...Cloning guarantees that the child's genetic makeup will be identical to that of whichever parent is cloned...
...Surely God can endow that infant with a soul...
...If we want to clone a person, most of us will think twice about cloning somebody we already know well...
...Some may surrender a kidney or bone marrow to their sibling...
...That we should ban...
...As every evolutionary scientist knows, the survival of a species depends on two forces—environmental change that rewards some creatures and penalizes others, and sufficient diversity among the species that no matter what the environment, some members of the species will benefit...
...Like most people, I instinctively recoil from the idea...
...I would love to have another Labrador retriever just like Winston and another pair of cats exactly like Sarah and Clementine...
...Not many of us know perfect people, least of all our own parents...
...Hardly any parents, I think, would allow their child to be used as an organ bank for defective adults or as the next-generation proxy for a malevolent dictator...
...Largely, I think, when the cloned child has no parents...
...We can try to curtail it by telling anyone who returns to this country with a child born abroad to an American citizen that one of two conditions must be met before the child will be regarded as an American citizen...
...But the real constraint on the misuse of cloning comes from a simple human tendency...
...she and her husband will determine its fate...
...Dolly was the only lamb to emerge out of 277 attempts, and we still do not know how long she will live or what diseases, if any, she might contract...
...Cloning would create a third choice: duplicate the father or the mother...
...Science cannot be stopped...
...Or do I want another woman like the mother, who is bright and sweet—but who has bad teeth, a family risk of breast cancer, and sleeps too late in the morning...
...This parental constraint would prevent organ farming and the indiscriminate or political misuse of cloning technology...
...I think that, provided certain conditions are met, the gains will turn out to exceed the risks...
...it cannot be given birth in a laboratory...
...In one special case we may want to clone a creature well known to us...
...Lured by the lottery, they help meet the species's need for biological diversity...
...This may make good sense to parents, but it is bad news for the species...
...My view—that cloning presents no special ethical risks if society does all in its power to establish that the child is born to a married woman and is the joint responsibility of the married couple—will not satisfy those whose objections to cloning are chiefly religious...
...Getting a clone from a laboratory would be like getting a puppy from a pet store: Both creatures might be charming, but neither would belong in any meaningful emotional sense to the owner...
...A premature ban on any scientific effort moving in the direction of cloning could well impede useful research on the genetic basis of diseases or on opportunities for improving agriculture...
...If man is made in the image of God, can man make himself (by cloning) and still be in God's image...
...Do we wish to make it easy for a homosexual pair to have children...
...My preliminary view is that the central problem is not creating an identical twin but creating it without parents...
...Suppose the father cannot provide sperm or the mother is unable to produce a fertil-izable egg...
...One way to constrain a couple's efforts to secure the "perfect" child would be to restrict their choice of genes to either the father or the mother...
...Already a great deal of work is underway on modifying the genetic structure of laboratory animals in order to study illnesses and to generate human proteins and antibodies...
...My friend Heather Higgins has said that cloning our pets—or at least some pets—may make sense...
...We should remember that a clone must be borne by a female...
...Any cloned offspring would reach maturity 40 or so years after his father was born, and by then so much would have changed—Hussein, Sr...
...If cloning is illegal in America but legal in Japan or China, Americans will go to those countries as cloning techniques are perfected...
...Parents, whether they acquire a child by normal birth, artificial insemination, or adoption, will, in the overwhelming majority of cases, become deeply attached to the infant and care for it without regard to its origin...
...Dolly had a mother, and if humans are produced the same way, they will have mothers, also...
...I sympathize with this reaction, but few critics have yet made clear to me what compelling aspect of nature cloning violates...
...Happily, we need not react immediately to human cloning...
...This is often asserted by critics of cloning who do not believe in an active God...
...But that reaction is exaggerated...
...There is no way to prevent this...
...More troubling is the possibility that a lesbian couple will use cloning to produce a child...
...Thomas Bouchard at the University of Minnesota, we know that giving identical twins different environments produces only slightly greater differences in character...
...Traits that today are desirable may become irrelevant or harmful in the future...
...I would ask of them only that they explain what it is about sexual fertilization that so affects God's judgment about the child that results...
...Cloning, of course, removes one of the conjugal partners, but it is hard to imagine that God's desire to bestow a unique soul can be blocked by the fact that the infant does not result from an egg and sperm's joining but instead arises from an embryonic egg's reproducing itself...
...The parent bringing it back must show by competent medical evidence either that the child is the product of a normal (non-cloned) birth or adoption or that the child, though the product of cloning, belongs to a married couple who will be responsible for it...
...but none, I think, has been "harvested...
...Each clone would be like an identical twin: nearly the same in appearance, very similar in intelligence and manner, and alike (but not a duplicate) in personality...
...And the risks attendant on a hasty reaction are great...
...I have not heard of any twin's being used against its will as an unwitting organ bank for its brother or sister...
...The fertilized egg is then put into the body of either the woman who produced it or another woman hired to bear the infant...
...And if we can clone only from among our own family, our desire to do it at all will be much weakened...
...And if it does not matter to the parents, should it matter to us...
...I would suggest that producing a fertilized egg by sexual contact does not uniquely determine that image and therefore that non-sexual, in vitro fertilization is acceptable...
...When we recall The Boys from Brazil, a story of identical offspring of Adolf Hitler being raised in order to further his horrible work, we are outraged...
...A human mother will carry a human clone...
...We should have learned this from the way we regulate drug treatments...
...The other philosophical objection is that cloning is contrary to nature...
...And they watch in wonder as the infant becomes an adult with its own unique personality and mannerisms...
...Failing this, the child could not become an American citizen...
...But not, I hope, unmarried mothers...
...There is, of course, a risk that cloning may increase the number of surrogate mothers, with all of the heartbreak and legal complexities that this entails, but I suspect that surrogates would be no more common for clones than they are for babies conceived in vitro...
...Perhaps parents' love of entering the reproductive lottery is itself a revelation of evolution at work, one designed to help maintain biological diversity...
...Moreover, if parents are tempted by certainty but limited to cells taken from either the father or the mother, they will have to ask themselves hard questions...
...Without human birth, the parents' attitude toward the infant will be deeply compromised...
...How should we react to this event...
...would probably not even be in power, and his country's political system might have been profoundly altered—that it is unlikely Hussein, Jr...
...We do not know how many parents will request cloning, but some will...
...When first proposed, in vitro fertilization was ethically suspect...
...offended by the mental picture of identical babies being produced in some biological factory...
...People maximizing the welfare of their infant can inhibit the welfare of the species...
...Our best hope for guarding against the duplication of a Saddam Hussein is a practical one...
...We already know from the study of identical twins reared in different families that they are remarkably similar...
...But of course some people would evade any restrictions...
...This is not a view that will commend itself to many devout Christians or Jews...
...Some parents who do not want to remain childless will find this more attractive than adoption, which introduces a wholly new and largely unknown genetic factor into their family tree...
...Cloning should be permitted only on behalf of two married partners, and the mother should— absent some special medical condition that doctors must certify—carry the fertile tissue to birth...
...I know they prefer sex to cloning...
...A cloned child, so far as we now know, cannot be produced in a laboratory...
...There is one important practical objection to the widespread use of cloning...
...At some time in the future, science may discover a way to produce a clone entirely in the laboratory...
...An egg and a sperm are united outside the human body in a glass container...
...Then the offspring would belong to the parents...
...I think that most people prefer the lottery to certainty...
...All parents spend countless delightful hours wondering whether the child has its mother's eyes or its father's smile or its grandfather's nose or its grandmother's personality...
...If so, it cannot easily be distinguished from the more practical problems...
...If the cloned child is born in the same way as a child resulting from marital congress, can it matter to the parents how it was conceived...
...could do what his father did...
...To the extent this objection has meaning, I think it must arise from the danger that the cloned child will be put to various harmful uses...
...Conception is a lottery...
...The idea that a cloned infant, born to its mother, would be treated differently is, I think, quite far-fetched...
...By cloning persons who have the desired trait, we can guarantee that the trait will appear in the infant...
...Nevertheless, bills to ban cloning research have been introduced...
...Governments have different policies on this...
...But before deciding what we think about cloning, we ought to pause and identify more precisely what it is about the process that is so distressing...
...A mother must give it birth...
...They are wrong...
...A cloned Hussein would have an IQ close to that of his father and a personality that (insofar as we can measure these things) would have roughly a 50 percent chance of being like his...
...And unclaimed clones would be disposed of the same way as unclaimed puppies—killed...
...We have no way of knowing what environmental challenges will confront us in the future...
...And if this is so, then non-sexually transplanting cell nuclei into enucleated eggs might also be acceptable...
...Two philosophical objections exist...
...I have no doubt that there will arise mad scientists willing to do these things...
...If unmarried cloning occurs, it is likely to be among affluent persons who think they are entitled to act without the restraints and burdens of family life...
...Such a family now has only two choices— remain childless or adopt...
...Indeed, given the likely expense and difficulty of cloning, and the absence from it of any sexual pleasure, we are unlikely to see many unmarried teenage girls choosing that method...
...Cloning seems to have given a large boost to environmentalists...
Vol. 2 • May 1997 • No. 36
