Cloning Around

J. Kevin Tumlinson

I'm not sure whether I should believe it yet or not. But there it is, in black and white- "World's First Human Clone Born." If it's true, the whole world is going to be in one big uproar soon, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one asking the big question: "What now?"

Let us just assume for a moment that the story is true.

Ok, so we've gotten this far, we can take a few skin cells and an unfertilized egg and make a perfect copy of someone. There's a trick you won't see at Kinko's anytime soon. But what does it mean? The end of civilization as we know it or the beginning of a whole new race?

Human beings are made with a simple recipe-one part mother, one part father, cook for nine months, add education to taste. Now there is the potential for a baby to be conceived with only one parent! You have to wonder, if we change up the recipe, is it a human being anymore?

If I make chocolate chip cookies and leave out the chocolate chips, I just have cookies, right? Still sweet, still some potential, but not what I was really going for.

Clonaid (that really is their name! Doesn't it sound like a bad soft drink company?) says that one eventual goal is to transplant the cell donor's brain into the clone. So the real goal is to cheat death and essentially live forever. It's a proposition I could get behind, but I'd want to make sure my spiffy new body didn't come with factory defects.

The last thing I want is to get involved in some big clone recall.

When I start pondering the moral and ethical arguments surrounding cloning, it occurs to me that the best advice comes from Jeff Goldblum's character, Ian Malcolm, in "Jurassic Park." After learning that the park scientists have recreated the dinosaurs through cloning, Ian says, "Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD."

Amen.

I'd love to trade in the ol' pot belly for a sleeker, newer model. I'd love to be able to ditch the indigestion, the bad eye sight, the stiff neck. But what would be the price? I'm not talking dollars and cents here, I'm asking the big philosophical question. What would I be giving up?

Personally, I believe there are much better uses for cloning and cloning research than trying to live forever. What about the ability to grow viable organs for transplants? What about couples that have problems conceiving a child? What about research that could help eliminate birth defects and hereditary conditions?

I agree that there could be catastrophic consequences to the widespread cloning of human beings. I believe, though, that the research itself is vital to the medical field. It's scary to think that a bunch of fringe lunatics with a homemade genetics lab may have stirred together a living human being, but that's all the more reason to make cloning research a legal, fully funded branch of the medical field.

What's scarier? The high-clearance, high-tech, high security government facility testing and researching under controlled conditions, or the Ted Kaczynski, "put it together in my basement," made with spare parts bio-lab next door?

J. Kevin Tumlinson is a writer and a schoolteacher living in Lake Jackson, TX. He thinks Clonaid is cool and refreshing.