Fearing the Worst Should Anyone Produce a Cloned Baby by Philip M. Boffey
In the following article from The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2004),
Philip Boffey looks at the fears associated with cloning. Boffey’s article first appeared in
the New York Times in 2004.
Experts increasingly suspect that a fringe cult’s claim to have cloned a human baby is a
publicity-seeking hoax, especially now that the group seems to be evading genetic tests
that might prove its claim. The cult’s deep-seated belief that space aliens created the
human race by cloning is so wacko that all of its other claims become suspect. But with
several renegade groups supposedly racing to produce the first cloned baby, it is almost
inevitable that sooner or later someone will succeed. It’s time to start preparing ourselves
mentally for that eventuality.
Until now, there has been widespread support in Congress for a ban on cloning to
produce babies – the only real debate has been over the use of cloned embryos to find
cures for disease. Even scientists who want to pursue therapeutic cloning have been
happy to endorse a ban on reproductive cloning for safety reasons. Judging from animal
tests, there is just too much risk that a cloned baby would be born with birth defects or
face medical problems as it ages. But if the renegade cloners ever present a healthy baby
who is shown by genetic tests to be a cloned copy of an adult, the safety argument will
become less persuasive. It will then be imperative to look much harder at the ethical and
moral implications of reproductive cloning.
The public’s fear and fascination with cloning, as expressed in popular culture,
focuses on some highly improbably scenarios. The Boys from Brazil, a 1978 movie based
on a novel, featured a plot by Nazi doctors to produce a cadre of young Hitler clones to
start a Fourth Reich. Although the villains tried to give the young Hitlers the same home
life as the original, the writers slid past the overwhelming probability that even Hitler
himself, introduced into a different historical context, would not have the same career
trajectory.
The most recent Star Wars movie, last year’s Attack of the Clones, featured an
army of clones derived form the genes of an aggressive bounty hunter, modified to ensure
willingness to follow military orders. The image of a horde of unthinking, cloned
attackers is a classic science-fiction nightmare. But producing such an army with today’s
techniques would require a huge number of women to supply the eggs and bear the fetal
clones to term, a problem that is often glossed over in horror stories. On amore individual
scale, the new Star Trek movie, Nemesis, pits a good spaceship captain against his evil
younger clone. The younger version went bad because of his harsh treatment when exiled
to hellish mines on a remote world, a nice reminder that genes alone do not dictate
destiny.
Over the years, people have fretted that cloning practiced widely might eliminate
the need for men (women could bear children asexually), might exacerbate the malefemale ratio (cultures that revere males could clone only them), and might reduce the
genetic diversity that comes from mingling genes in sexual reproduction. But those
scenarios suppose that cloning might indeed become the preferred means of reproduction,
an event that would seem to require an unlikely mass change in human preferences or a
totalitarian regime to impose its will. In a democratic, free-market society, commercial
entities might well promote cloning, but such marketing has not turned in vitro
fertilization or the freezing of bodies for later resurrection into mass commodities.
Some critics fear that cloning could usher in a new eugenics, in which nations or
individuals might try to improve the average capabilities of the next generation by
cloning the likes of an Einstein, Mozart, Michael Jordan, or Marilyn Monroe. Such
genetic enhancement has in fact been endorsed by some eminent scientists in the past,
and no doubt there are individuals who might want offspring with particular talents. Yet
sperm banks with seed from famous and accomplished men have existed for some time
with no sign of a mass rush to use them.
In its report on human cloning last year, the President’s Council on Bioethics
worried that cloning to produce children could disrupt the normal relationships between
generations and within families, could turn children into manufactured products rather
than independent beings, and could put undue pressure on a cloned child living in the
shadow of a genetically identical adult. Most of the panel’s concerns were necessarily
speculative, and some of its worries seem overdrawn. Twins seem to do just fine with the
same genome, for example, so it is not clear that having a twin a generation older would
be all that burdensome. Nor is it clear that families with a cloned child would face more
confusing relationships than already exist in today’s divorced, blended, and extended
families. On the other hand, cloning could prove medically useful for couples worried
about passing on genetic diseases, infertile individuals who could not have a biologically
related child any other way, or parents needing a compatible tissue donor to cure a sick
child.
For the immediate future, Congress would be wise to ban reproductive cloning as
far too risky while allowing therapeutic cloning to proceed. But sooner or later technical
advances may diminish the risks. The nation needs to focus on what to do then.