Sometimes it almost seems we regard anything science does to improve us as a cunning attempt to do us in. So it is now, with the alarmed and mostly misinformed reaction to the news that doctors have managed to divide–“clone”–a primitive human embryo. There are any number of nightmare scenarios making the rounds about the potentiality for copying human beings. The clear favorite is the “Boys from Brazil” conceit–a nursery full of mustached little babes with a certain dictatorial glitter in their eyes. The cloned-Nazi thesis haunts the collective consciousness. “People love to sit back and imagine Nazi eugenic nightmares,” says John C. Fletcher, professor of biomedical ethics at the University of Virginia. Perhaps that allows us to worry less–or do less–about the real monsters in our midst. But the trouble is, such groundless fears end up putting a damper on research that could be worth its weight in eventual benefits. Even critics of embryo cloning admit that, if it can be made to work, it would be an immediate boon to infertile couples anxious for a better shot at in vitro fertilization.
The sillier concerns about cloning tend to get muddled with the serious ones. it does seem inevitable, for instance, that commercial interests will take a hand in copying embryos. Commerce in reproduction is hardly new: such for-profit practices as selling sperm, surrogate mother-hood and brokered adoptions have been going on for years, and in vitro fertilization has become a thriving “Egg McMuffin” franchise for some medical entrepreneurs. Already, there are thousands of frozen embryos sitting in liquid-nitrogen storage around the country. When cloning comes, the profit potential will increase. “Suppose somebody wanted to advertise cloned embryos by showing pictures of already born children, like a product,” says Prof. Ruth Macklin, of New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who specializes in ethics in human reproduction. “Unlike frozen embryos, you know how these are going to turn out. ‘She’s in first grade. See how cute she is’.” Fortunately, says Macklin, infertile couples are not very likely to give up a cloned embryo. “However, if there was a market in it–people do–all kinds of things for money.” A couple would not get the fertility services free, but would get a free embryo. “That’s something that could happen and could be done,” says Albert Jensen, chairman of the National Advisory Board on Ethics and Reproduction. ‘An army of little Hitlers is not." Some of the realistic scenarios, indeed, are scarier than the more fevered ones. What would prevent clinics from signing contracts with parents who seem likely to produce ideal specimens, thus promoting a black market in embryos for childless couples? That could lead us farther down the road toward eugenic “shopping,” the selecting out of undesirables. “You could clone 100 Hitler embryos and not get a single Hitler, because he was shaped by his environment,” says Erik Parens of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in New York’s Westchester County. “You could, however, clone 100 Aryans, because those things are not contingent on a particular environment.” Another troubling possibility is using clones for replacement parts-or worse, to replace a child who dies with a clone from the freezer.
Those are all corporal problems. There are threats to the spirit, too. We have come to believe that all human beings are equal; but even more firmly, we are taught to believe each of us is unique. Is that idea undercut by cloning? That is, if you can theoretically, deliberately make any number of copies of an individual, is each one special? How special can clones feel, knowing they were replicated like smile buttons? Questions like that may one day be more than abstract. “What do we mean when we talk about human identity?” says Jensen. “What would it mean if I ran into one of me in the grocery store some day? What makes me me? How much of my identity is in having a genome from my parents that nobody else quite has?” Jensen has a ready enough answer for his own questions. “We aren’t just our genes, we’re a whole collection of our experiences,” he says. But the idea, he adds, raises a host of issues, “from the fantastic to the profound.”
One lesson from the current discussion is that it doesn’t help to jump to glib conclusions. Some of the scenarios that evolve may seem bizarre, for example, but are they unethical? Many ethicists think not. “Is everything that makes people squeamish therefore wrong?” asks Macklin.
Others warn that, nevertheless, many possible applications of cloning are morally suspect and ought to be approached with caution. A set of guidelines could help.
But it may take more than guidelines to deal with some of the larger questions. Some ethicists and historians of ask where the mastery of embryology and genetics is leading; indeed, where has it already taken us? It’s likely that our perception of life, our deepest idea of what it is to be human, has been altered in significant ways by such developments as organ transplants and surrogate motherhood. Already, some of us are hybrids, in a sense. In one much discussed case, a Duarte, Calif., family had a second child so she could donate bone marrow to her teenage sister, a leukemia victim. The stratagem was successful. “All the cases I know of have turned out just fine,” says Norman Fost, a medical ethicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Even if somebody did clone babies for this purpose, I don’t see how the cloned individual would feel his or her life was not worth living.” It could be argued, in fact, that the individual would feel it even more worthwhile to live. But using people for their organs is disturbing, argues Patricia King, a professor of law at Georgetown University who specializes in biomedicine and public policy. “It’s sort of like raising pigs or horses.”
All these matters are overdue for the kind of public airing they are just beginning to get now. For years, elected leaders have ducked the discussion because topics like fetal research impinge on the dangerous subject of abortion. But they may find it harder to avoid, as scientists and commercial enterprisers gain more control over the fundaments of life, and thus over our individual and collective destinies.
