March 4

March 4, 1997

Send in the Clones

Sometimes I think cloning myself wouldn't be such a bad idea. He could mow the lawn and I could write Soapbox articles. He could watch the kids and I could take my wife out for dinner.

But then I realize that I've fallen for the typical Star-Trek view of cloning: You put James Kirk and a pile of goo in a centrifuge and spin them around really fast. After a few minutes you get an identical James Kirk that you can send to take over the Enterprise.

In reality, human cloning is more like in vitro fertilization. You replace the genetic material in a human egg with genetic material from another individual. You end up with a baby, not a full-grown adult.

So I'd have to wait a long time before my clone could mow the lawn.

The moral implications of human cloning are no more complicated than those of any other artificial insemination technique. There's nothing unique about the fact that you end up with a genetic copy of a living person; the same thing happens in identical twins.

What we do need to deal with is the fact that cloning, like other artificial techniques for initiating pregnancy, has more failures than successes. The breeders of "Dolly" (cloned from the mammary glands of a ewe, and named after the most famous mammary glands on the planet -- demonstrating that these scientists don't get out much) blew through lots of eggs and lots of embryos before getting one to work (over 200 I think they said). If you, like I, believe that life begins at conception, it's a problem when you start doing that to humans.

So now Mr. Clinton has called for a ban on human cloning research until the government can decide what the ethical issues are. (Letting Mr. Clinton's government make decisions about ethics is like putting O.J. in charge of the L.A. Women's Crisis center, but that's another story.)

This ban demonstrates at once Clinton's hypocrisy, his failed political position, and his scientific naiveté. His hypocrisy in that he has no problem with taking human life in abortion, but he has to study the idea of creating it; his failed political position in that his first response to people doing something he doesn't like is to swing the sickle of big government; and his scientific naiveté in that evolutionistic scientists will just perform this research on primates, thinking they're "close enough" to human that the knowledge will easily transfer.