Duplicity about Duplication

Cloning as Lens for Millenial Angst

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In late February a wave of hysterical, technophobic paranoia swept the world with the announcement that Scottish scientists had cloned a sheep. Reported as the first successful cloned mammal, it was quickly followed by American claims of successfully cloned monkeys. The media promoted stories as heralding the immanent cloning of humans. The mantra of "brave new world" was intoned endlessly, as reporters breathlessly conjured images of millions of pencil-mustachioed Austrian painters. But cloning is yet another medical technique which might be of benefit for human beings, but which it will be difficult to explore because of knee-jerk BioLuddism and irresponsible reporting.

Timothy Druckrey: The Science of the Lambs
Florian Rötzer: Dolly und die Folgen
James J. Hughes: Embracing Change with All Four Arms: A Post-Humanist Defense of Genetic Engineering or, in german language, Verteidigung der Gentechnologie
James J. Hughes

Just another Medical Technique

Human cloning is not a new issue to those who have paid attention. In 1993, American researchers launched a similar flurry of hyperbolic hand-wringing by announcing that they'd cloned a human embryo. But that journalists lack historical depth, or a broad philosophical perspective, is not surprising. The lack of depth, caution and perspective among bioethics experts was a surprise.

Sadly most of those who offer bioethics expertise to the media eagerly seconded the vague, but serious sounding cant. "If we can't stop human cloning, we can't stop anything," intoned one American bioethicist. "Researchers pursuing this are on the way to prison, not to a Nobel prize," opined another. The American Congress and European Parliament took steps to legislate against the menace, and the American President instructed his new Bioethics Advisory council to study the issue.

Sadly, the only frightening thing about animal or human cloning is how quickly the Western public can be whipped into a fury against legitimate medical and veterinary research. Human cloning poses no new ethical or political questions, and it raises no issue which is not adequately covered by the laws and regulations of Western societies. Rather it is yet another medical technique which might be of benefit for human beings, but which it will be difficult to explore because of knee-jerk BioLuddism and irresponsible reporting.

Why Do We Want to Clone?

What is cloning and what are some of its benefits? Cloning involves the use of the genetic material of an animal, at some point after conception, to create another organism that is genetically identical. The easiest way to clone is to tease apart the clumps of eight, sixteen and 32 cells of newly conceived animals. These cells are not yet differentiated, and can continue to grow into genetically identical copies. This form of "twinning" was what scientists in St. Louis acknowledged doing with human embryos in 1993.

Far more challenging is the effort to produce a genetic copy of an animal from a differentiated cell. The sheep, "Dolly," which the Scots produced was produced from DNA from a cell of her mother-sister's mammary tissue, inserted into a ovum that had had its nucleus removed.

The advantages of animal cloning are potentially huge, both commercially and scientifically. Populations of cloned research animals would eliminate the bothersome genetic variation between lab animals in controlled experiments. The animal husbandry industry is excited to replicate animals with desirable traits, without risking their loss or dilution in sexual reproduction.

There are also many potential applications for human cloning. One application, the one being explored by the Americans who cloned the human embryo, was to reduce the number of ova that need to be painfully harvested from women undergoing in-vito fertilization for infertility. Embryo twinning could multiply the number of embryos available for implantation.

Embryo twinning could also make large amounts of embryonic tissue available for research and transplantation. Research into cancer, congenital deformity, contraceptives, and so on would be greatly facilitated by expanding the amount of available tissue. The use of embryonic tissue transplant is also being explored for many diseases, from organ failure to Alzheimers disease.

Finally, there are the uses that parents might make of cloning to have children that are genetically identical to themselves, relatives, or people with desirable traits. Parents might choose to clone one of themselves rather than sexually reproduce if one parent had a serious genetic disease. Parents might want to have the clone of a child, relative or friend who had died, as a homage of love. Parents might simply like to have the clone of a famous person, whose traits they hope are inherited.

The fear-mongers are correct that the potential uses for cloning do range from the mundane to the fantastic and horrific. So do the potential uses of hammers, tape and glue. With cloning, as with the threats we face from madmen armed with hammers, tape and glue, our laws are adequate to the task of controlling these uses and abuses. Cloning requires no new legislation, and legitimate medical and commercial uses should not be hampered by ill-founded paranoia.

The "Right to Genetic Identity"

Many opponents of human cloning have proposed that we have a right to be the only one with our genes. Many simpler societies took this concept of natural order seriously, and murdered one or both twins at birth. Apparently none of the contemporary advocates of biological uniqueness want to take the argument to the extreme of forbidding twins and twinning, and if they were to look closely at twins, many of their fears about clones might be allayed.

Sociobiologists claim that social solidarity is stronger with genetic similarity, but one does not have to accept sociobiology to acknowledge that twins, and genetically related family in general, share a form of intimacy. It may be "merely" a social construct, or even a reactionary delusion, but genetic bonds are valued by most humans. Some Western parents are willing to spend a year or more of income in order to have children who share half their genes. Rather than being viewed as mere instrumentalities, or back-up copies of their "original," clones are far more likely to be valued as twin siblings. This may not guarantee psychological health or lack of social stigma, but cloning will certainly not be a threat to individuation or full-human status.

Fears of Fascist Duplication

A second red herring is the claim that the technology of cloning will lead immediately to death camps for the genetically inferior, mass production of Aryan ideals, and Aldous Huxley's dystopian "brave new world." Fascist societies will undoubtedly use reproductive technologies for fascist purposes, just as democratic societies will use reproductive technologies for democratic purposes. Technologies are not fascist in themselves, and technologies do not cause fascism. Cloning will no more bring on the Fourth Reich than driving a Volkswagen, or eating wiener schnitzel. If women are guaranteed reproductive freedom by a liberal democratic state, they will make use of cloning and other techniques for their own purposes, and not the State's or the Volk's.

No amount of technological abstinence by liberal democracies will prevent illiberal societies from using reproductive technologies. Even if the United Nations and other bodies unanimously affirm their opposition to human cloning, it will be very difficult to detect and enforce small-scale cloning. If we are concerned that mad dictators will use cloning coercively to produce a super-race, we need to prevent the rise of mad dictators, not cloning.

Rights to Bodily Autonomy

One of the central rights of liberal democracy is the right to control one's body, and its corollary is the right to reproductive freedom. Protecting bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom not only ensures our right to clone, but also constrains how we clone.

American law recognizes several related liberties which can act as a sufficient regulatory regime for cloning. The first is the right to have children with anyone you want, and to use reproductive technology to have them, if you can find a clinic that will take your money. The second liberty is the right to sell your own renewable body tissues, such as sperm and blood (as opposed to non-renewable body tissues like livers and hearts). American law also protects the individual from any touching, medical or otherwise, without free and informed consent.

In the case of cloning, these three liberal principles would suggest that we should be allowed to make use of our own genetic material to have as many cloned children of our own, of consenting partners, or of tissue donors, as we want. We should also be allowed to sell or donate our tissue for the purpose of cloning, if the recipient has made clear that the tissue will be used for cloning. (Most courts will probably forbid tissues of the dead from being used unless they agreed before death, though I personally don't think cloning the dead can violate their rights.)

These few principles lay to rest many of the breathless fears expressed in the media. What if some government agency decides to clone you from skin cells you sloughed onto your tax form? That should be illegal, unless you consent on the check-off box on the tax form.

Rights of Persons

Similarly, the exploitation of clones as a sub-human race of organ donors, slaves or drones would be as illegal as it is impractical. Clones will be citizens, with all the rights of citizens. Cloned embryos and fetuses, on the other hand, will have all the rights that each society accords to embryos and fetuses - some societies will permit the kinds of research and transplantation with fetal tissue I mentioned above, and some will not. But it appears very unlikely that any Western society would create a legal distinction between the citizenship rights of the product of human cloning or genetic engineering, and a "natural" human. After all, we have had no problem recognizing the citizenship of the tens of thousands of "test-tube babies" already living.

Legitimate concern about the exploitation of genetic products should be directed to transgenic human-animal hybrids, another long-standing source of horror and revulsion for primordial psycho-anthropological reasons. While a cloned human will be recognized as fully human, a monkey with some human characteristics might be a tremendously useful slave laborer. Cloning is fully regulable within current concepts of jurisprudence, but transgenic animals, and other tools, will force the 21st century to redefine the levels and thresholds for citizenship without the handy equation "born of woman = citizen."

Strategies around Fin-de-Millenium Angst

Many of those who wrote about cloning said explicitly that they were just nervous. "Things are moving so fast - let's slow it down till we know what we're doing." Technology should be under better collective, democratic control, and we should take a careful look at technologies before unleashing them on the world. In the case of cloning, banning the practice for ten or twenty years probably would not deprive us of vital commercial or medical technologies. If social and technological progress were a chess-game, I would gladly sacrifice cloning for an uncensored Internet, new contraceptives, or transgenic tomatoes that don't turn into mush in the refrigerator. Unfortunately, as Neibuhr said, first they come for the clone-makers, then for the net pornographers and tomato-breeders.

The harm from Bio-Luddism in this case is not that it will deny humanity an essential fruit of its own creativity, but that it would be a concession to irrational fear. Cloning may be like gay marriage, where the risks are only in the fevered imaginations of the opponents. Or it may be like drug legalization and free-speech for pornographers, which must be advanced even as we work to curb their potential ill-effects, and democratize the societies in which they exist, because we want to live in as free a society as possible. Either way, it is possible to control technology democratically without lurches and panics - "stop the world, I want off" - in response to media hype. Remind yourself next time you're stunned by technological progress.

James J. Hughes