As human as you and I

Banning a practice is a last resort, not the first. Some people might feel abhorrence at the prospect of being cloned, but why does this give them the right to prevent those who seek the procedure? You or I might find plastic surgery unpalatable, but does that mean we should ban it? The human right to reproduce and form families transcends the right of society to regulate science. This is, of course, an opinion, but it is in the spirit of the conservatism that many cloning opponents purport to represent.

History has shown that scientific advances often have unanticipated positive, as well as negative, outcomes. It is tough to predict just how a technology will eventually be used. No one expected the Internet, for instance, to become accessible to most households. No one expected laser eye surgery to become a mass-market outpatient procedure. Animal cloning is already being investigated for a fascinating new use: bringing endangered species back from the edge of extinction.

Closing the door on potentially helpful scientific developments is an extreme reaction, and one that has sometimes quickly proved misguided. The United States originally banned in vitro fertilization technologies when they were developed in the late 1970s. Politicians then realized that the procedure was unthreatening, and American scientists had to spend the next several years catching up with their foreign competitors. In fact, when the National Bioethics Advisory Council first deliberated on regulating cloning, it called for a voluntary ban on reproductive cloning combined with a reconsideration of the issue in a designated period of time. This is much more sensible than what the House just enacted.

A final reason that a ban on human cloning would be a terrible idea, quite apart from libertarian considerations, is that it is doomed to fail. Many in the scientific community believe that cloned human children will be born, probably sooner than later, whether we like it or not. Dr. Robert Edwards, the scientist behind the first "test tube baby" in 1978; Dr. Patrick Dixon, a futurist; Dr. Mark Sauer, Columbia University's in vitro fertilization expert; Dr. Rudolph Jaenisch, a Whitehead Institute cloning pioneer; and Steen Willadsen, the first scientist to clone mammals from embryos -- all are among the many scientists who have gone on the record as saying that human cloning is imminent if it has not, in fact, already taken place quietly.

Despite the belief among laymen that the process is mysterious and complex, the key to human cloning at this point is not undiscovered scientific knowledge or technique but sheer persistence. As Edwards told Glasgow's Sunday Herald last year, "Cloning an embryo is not difficult. An ordinary fertility clinic would not find it difficult. They could extract the nucleus of an egg and produce an embryo within a day or two."

Most early attempts at cloning will likely end in miscarriage, and the human suffering resulting from these losses is at the center of arguments most frequently advanced by scientists who seek either a ban or a slowdown in cloning research. But the same risks were originally associated with in vitro fertilization, which had an initial success rate of just 5 percent. Now it is 20 to 30 percent. While no one who has other possibilities for making a baby chooses in vitro fertilization, thousands of couples have accepted the risks, discomfort and substantial cost of the procedure.

Cloning would likely be the choice of just a tiny minority of individuals seeking to reproduce, but as long as it is a possibility, it is unlikely that a ban will keep some researchers from attempting it. To paraphrase the gun lobby bumper sticker, if cloning is outlawed, only outlaws will have clones. Currently, human reproduction cloning is prohibited only in Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy and Japan. But if the move to ban cloning worldwide gains momentum, as suggested by the United Nations' 2001 nonbinding resolution, the research will move to less regulated, typically less advanced settings where the likelihood of medical misadventure is much greater. Only fringe groups with little to lose would pursue cloning, since no responsible scientist would risk his or her career to defy the ban. So we can assume that the work will be done by unqualified scientific dabblers, which is not what we want.

Instead of banning cloning, we should be gathering the best scientific minds to decide how to properly regulate it. This would probably involve an emphasis on research to improve the survival rate of implanted cloned embryos in animals before attempting human pregnancies. We should also take a clearer look at the philosophical place clones would occupy in our society.

Throughout the history of Western philosophy, human identity has been located in the possession of a unique consciousness and memory, not in unique physiognomy. Your clone would not have the same experiences as you, and so neither the same memories nor the same identity. This is not a question of nature versus nurture, but of epistemology. This is why we view identical twins as separate individuals. This is why doing plastic surgery on someone to make him identical to another person would still result in two different people. (Films have often been the place where these issues have been most imaginatively explored -- think about "Blade Runner" and, for the last-named possibility, "Face Off.")

Somehow we have allowed our panic over cloning -- or is it our fear of unconventional families and relationships created by "will"? -- to obscure the fact that human cloning would also represent one of the most important moments in human history. The moment when the first human clone is born would be historically, and somewhat ominously for our clones, on a plane with the first encounters of Europeans with native Americans. And the judgment of history will be upon us for the way we treat them. If we are destined, as scientists say, to find clones in our midst, will the same fears and prejudices that cause us to reject the technology move us to reject the children who come of it? The real challenge posed by cloning may be to our most basic ability of all, the ability to accept and love others -- and their otherness.

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