As human as you and I

A proposed ban on reproductive cloning demonstrates our irrational fear of the unknown, not the vagaries of science.

By Ann Marlowe

Mar 12, 2003 | "Images of a divided existence -- of Doppelgangers and Doubles -- become most compelling when family relationships are most upset."

That line from cultural critic Hillel Schwartz comes from his 1994 book, "The Culture of the Copy," but it speaks directly to the current controversy over human cloning. Late last month, the House of Representatives passed a bill that bans human cloning for both reproduction and stem-cell research. So irrational was the panic over cloning that an exception to the cloning bill for stem-cell research was also defeated. The bill is not likely to gather the necessary 60 Senate votes, largely because stem-cell research has many and eloquent defenders. But human reproductive cloning, currently ineligible for government funding, is likely to be banned in the near future.

This prospect, though expected, should not pass unremarked. As Schwartz implies, there is a large irrational element in our feelings about doubles and clones, and I would argue that the severity of the House bill -- those who defy the ban would be liable for a fine of $1 million and up to 10 years in prison -- has more to do with our fears than with public-policy objectives or science.

With its ban on cloning, the House of Representatives is circling the wagons against a phantom army of clones, precisely because the wagons don't protect what they used to. Blended families of exes, halves and steps, same-sex couples, fertility drug twins, adopted children and serial cohabitators constitute a growing precentage of the families we have these days; and while love allows us to accept these new forms of affiliation, an underlying anxiety over their novelty has never disappeared. The past 50 years have brought more changes to the family than the past 500 or even 2,500 years, and to those who perceive these new families as artificial, they are disquieting and, at some deep level, unacceptable. Of course, human history is filled with practices once considered "natural" and now abhorred, like slavery, and with those formerly condemned as "unnatural" and now unquestioned, like the right of women to work and vote.

Even as the media churned out nearly 9,000 articles about the alleged cloning of a baby, announced late last year by the bizarre Raelian sect, most Americans remain vague about what a human clone would be. Several well-educated people of my acquaintance admitted to envisioning a clone as a sort of fully mature homunculus that could be harvested for spare parts. Questions such as "Can a clone have a soul?" are posed with the seriousness of a 13th century Sorbonne debate, heightening the sci-fi imaginings of those -- a majority of us, in fact -- who know nothing of the rather pedestrian procedure followed to clone a human being.

In fact, a clone created with existing technology would be just as human as you and I. Human reproductive cloning (also known as nuclear somatic cloning) involves introducing the cells from the nucleus of a human cell into an egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed. It results in an embryo and, if implanted in a woman's womb, a baby. A woman could produce a clone of herself, or of an unrelated man or woman. How the child would look and behave is unknown, just as the appearance and personality of a baby produced in the traditional fashion is unknown. The cat recently cloned by scientists at Texas A&M University (and funded by Genetic Savings and Loan, a commercial venture), does not resemble her mother in appearance or personality, a development attributed, in part, to the impact of the prenatal environment on the fetus -- also a factor in human fetal development.

Cloning for research, unlike reproductive cloning, destroys the embryo to harvest the stem cells. For those who believe that life begins at conception, creating embryos to be destroyed in the course of research is wrong; for the rest of us, it is a way to develop cures for intractable diseases. But, to set the record straight: Reproductive cloning creates an embryo intended to grow into a baby, not an organism from which to harvest specialized tissue for stem cells.

Next Page: In his moralistic fear mongering, Kass defies logic

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