Cloning

cloning, is it right?:  The successful cloning of an adult sheep,
announced in Scotland this past February, is one of the most

dramatic recent examples of a scientific discovery becoming a public issue.
During the last few months,

various commentators -- scientists and theologians, physicians and legal
experts, talk-radio hosts and

editorial writers -- have been busily responding to the news, some calming
fears, other raising alarms

about the prospect of cloning a human being.

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[Category]:

Social Issues

[Paper Title]:

cloning, is it right?

[Text]:

The successful cloning of an adult sheep, announced in Scotland this past
February, is one of the most

dramatic recent examples of a scientific discovery becoming a public issue.
During the last few months,

various commentators -- scientists and theologians, physicians and legal
experts, talk-radio hosts and

editorial writers -- have been busily responding to the news, some calming
fears, other raising alarms

about the prospect of cloning a human being. At the request of the President,
the National Bioethics

Advisory Commission (NBAC) held hearings and prepared a report on the
religious, ethical, and legal

issues surrounding human cloning. While declining to call for a permanent ban
on the practice, the

Commission recommended a moratorium on efforts to clone human beings, and
emphasized the

importance of further public deliberation on the subject.

An interesting tension is at work in the NBAC report. Commission members were
well aware of "the

widespread public discomfort, even revulsion, about cloning human
beings." Perhaps recalling the images

of Dolly the ewe that were featured on the covers of national news magazines,
they noted that "the impact

of these most recent developments on our national psyche has been quite
remarkable." Accordingly, they

felt that one of their tasks was to articulate, as fully and sympathetically
as possible, the range of concerns

that the prospect of human cloning had elicited.

Yet it seems clear that some of these concerns, at least, are based on false
beliefs about genetic influence

and the nature of the individuals that would be produced through cloning.
Consider, for instance, the fear

that a clone would not be an "individual" but merely a "carbon
copy" of someone else -- an automaton of

the sort familiar from science fiction. As many scientists have pointed out,
a clone would not in fact be an

identical copy, but more like a delayed identical twin. And just as identical
twins are two separate people

-- biologically, psychologically, morally and legally, though not genetically
-- so, too, a clone would be a

separate person from her non-contemporaneous twin. To think otherwise is to
embrace a belief in genetic

determinism -- the view that genes determine everything about us, and that
environmental factors or the

random events in human development are insignificant.

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that genetic determinism is false.
In coming to understand the

ways in which genes operate, biologists have also become aware of the myriad
ways in which the

environment affects their "expression." The genetic contribution to
the simplest physical traits, such as

height and hair color, is significantly mediated by environmental factors
(and possibly by stochastic events

as well). And the genetic contribution to the traits we value most deeply,
from int

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