Human Cloning Should it be ba
Human Cloning- Should it be baCloning Humans
Cloning already happens by accident, not particularly often, but often enough that we all know examples. Identical twins are true clones of each other, with the same genes. So, the new discovery just announced from Edinburgh can't be all that radical in its moral and ethical implications. Heaven's foundations don't quiver every time a pair of identical twins is born.
Nevertheless, two bees seem to be buzzing around in public bonnets. First, the new technique makes baby duplicates of an existing adult. We might, as it were, clone Stephen Hawking or Mother Teresa, and this is not the same thing as twins of the same age. Second, the specter is raised of multiple clones, regiments of identical individuals marching by the thousand, in lockstep to a Brave New Millennium. Looked at in certain ways, both these notions can be made to seem unpleasant. Phalanxes of identical little Hitlers, goosestepping to the same genetic drum, is a thought so horrifying as to overshadow any lingering curiosity we might have over the final solution to the "nature or nurture" problem.
But do you whisper to yourself a secret confession? Wouldn't you love to be cloned? I've never admitted it before, but I think I would. This has nothing to do with vanity, with thinking that the world would be a better place if there was another one of me going on after I'm dead. It is pure curiosity. I know how I turned out having been born in the 1940s, schooled in the 1950s, come of age in the 1960s, and so on. I find it a personally riveting thought that I could watch a small copy of myself, fifty years younger and wearing a baseball hat instead of a solar topee, nurtured through the early decades of the twenty first century. Mightn't it feel almost like turning back your personal clock fifty years? And mightn't it be wonderful to advise your junior copy on where you went wrong, and how to do itt better?
Are some people motivated by a watered down version of this feeling when they want to have ordinary children, by the approved method? Their trouble is that the duplication is watered down too. By sex. Your child may half resemble you, but it has half your spouse�s genes too. Wonderful as that is (depending on your view of your spouse), it is hardly the full clock-zeroing experience.
Anyway, that is self-indulgent fantasy. It is...
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