PERSPECTIVE ON CLONING : A Threat to Individual Uniqueness : An attempt to aid childless couples by engineered conceptions could transform the idea of human identity.
You don’t need to be a fan of science fiction to know the competing fantasies about the cloning of human beings, producing one, 10 or 1,000 genetically identical people. There is the dictator who clones human slaves to fight the wars and do the scut work of society. There is the more benign fantasy of the re-creation of Einsteins by the dozens, his brilliance living on for the continued benefit of all. There is also the other side of that coin: the possibility of bringing Hitler back into our midst by the dozens.
These imagined possibilities have gone back and forth over the years, by turns fearsome, intriguing and puzzling. Yet they seemed nothing more than idle speculation. Now, much to everyone’s surprise, medical science is taking the first, decisive steps toward making fantasy real. A fertilization specialist at George Washington University, Dr. Jerry L. Hall, made news last month by describing an experiment in which his research team twinned a human embryo--17 embryos, to be exact--in the laboratory. While not cloning in the sense of using a tissue cell from an adult to grow a duplicate of the person who donated it, the replication of one unique human embryo into exact duplicates is startling enough.
As so often happens, long-awaited scientific breakthroughs do not necessarily make their first appearance as we imagined they might. They can steal upon us in small steps. Hall was not trying to re-create a Hitler or an Einstein, much less produce a cloned army. He was engaged in the more benign business of helping infertile couples have children. None of the science-fiction writers had noted that possibility, nor had anyone else. This development did not come to us as high drama at all. It came, instead, as merely the further pursuit of medically engineered infertility relief, of a kind that has been with us for some decades now.
That quiet beginning is bewildering in many ways, making it all the harder to know how best to pass a moral judgment on the advance. Should we focus our attention on the more lurid possibilities down the line in the future, which should surely scare us, or on the more attractive ones immediately at hand? Where should we start in passing judgment? Or should we perhaps desist from passing judgment at all, just leaving the matter up to the private decision of infertility specialists and their patients?
We must pass a societal judgment. Here is a perfect case of a scientific development that has enormous implications for us all, not simply the comparatively few infertile couples who might be the first users of it. Hall’s achievement can change our ideas and practices about what it means to have a child, alter our thinking about the significance of human life. And it can transform our conception of human identity and uniqueness.
For all of its haphazard qualities, there is one enormous advantage in the current random genetic lottery: Save for the occasional natural twinning, it gives each of us our own unique identity. There is no one else in the world like us. This is a precious gift of nature. It allows us to become our own person, to have some of our parents’ genetic traits, but to have even more of our own. Nature does not make us in our parents’ image: It makes us in our own unrepeatable image. Cloning would deprive the products of an engineered conception of that gift. They would be the manufactured product of their parents’ desire.
But isn’t that their business and not ours? The answer should be no. When a couple makes use of a technique to relieve infertility that can easily, in other hands, be put to less attractive, even dangerous, ends, their choice has implications for all of us. Moreover, when parents impose upon a child an identity specified by them rather than by the lottery of nature, they rob that child of its uniqueness, which we should all seek to protect.
I am not suggesting we ban such procedures. Scientific research should not be banned, even if dangerous. A ban probably could not be enforced anyway, inviting a Kevorkian-like scientist to provide under the table what could not be had in the open. But the weight of public opinion can be brought to bear. It can be used to discourage the research from going forward, and it can be deployed to persuade desperate couples not to go that route in seeking a child.
Infertility can be a great tragedy for a couple. They are robbed of a great blessing of their life together. Yet a means of helping them that almost certainly opens the way to eventual misuse, with harmful results for all of us, is a door best left closed. The human race has survived well enough in the past without cloning, and it can continue to do so in the future.
