THE PARADOX OF CLONING

But before deciding what we think about cloning, we ought to pause and identify more precisely what it is about the process that is so distressing. My preliminary view is that the central problem is not creating an identical twin but creating it without parents.

Happily, we need not react immediately to human cloning. The task of moving from one sheep to many sheep, and from sheep to other animals, and from animals to humans, will be long and difficult. Dolly was the only lamb to emerge out of 277 attempts, and we still do not know how long she will live or what diseases, if any, she might contract.

And the risks attendant on a hasty reaction are great. A premature ban on any scientific effort moving in the direction of cloning could well impede useful research on the genetic basis of diseases or on opportunities for improving agriculture. Already a great deal of work is underway on modifying the genetic structure of laboratory animals in order to study illnesses and to generate human proteins and antibodies. Aware of the value of genetic research, several members of Congress have expressed reservations about quick legislative action. Nevertheless, bills to ban cloning research have been introduced.

But even if such bills pass, the argument will be far from over. Congress may regulate or even block cloning research in the United States, but other countries are free to pursue their own strategies. If cloning is illegal in America but legal in Japan or China, Americans will go to those countries as cloning techniques are perfected. Science cannot be stopped. We should have learned this from the way we regulate drug treatments. We can ban a risky but useful drug, but the only effect is to limit its use to those who are willing and able to pay the airfare to Hong Kong.

There are both philosophical and utilitarian objections to cloning. Two philosophical objections exist. The first is that cloning violates God’s will by creating an infant in a way that does not depend on human sexual congress or make possible the divine inculcation of a soul. That is true, but so does in vitro fertilization. An egg and a sperm are united outside the human body in a glass container. The fertilized egg is then put into the body of either the woman who produced it or another woman hired to bear the infant. When first proposed, in vitro fertilization was ethically suspect. Today, it is generally accepted, and for good reason. Science supplies what one or both human bodies lack, namely, a reasonable chance to produce an infant. Surely God can endow that infant with a soul. Cloning, of course, removes one of the conjugal partners, but it is hard to imagine that God’s desire to bestow a unique soul can be blocked by the fact that the infant does not result from an egg and sperm’s joining but instead arises from an embryonic egg’s reproducing itself.

The other philosophical objection is that cloning is contrary to nature. This is often asserted by critics of cloning who do not believe in an active God. I sympathize with this reaction, but few critics have yet made clear to me what compelling aspect of nature cloning violates. To the extent this objection has meaning, I think it must arise from the danger that the cloned child will be put to various harmful uses. If so, it cannot easily be distinguished from the more practical problems.

One set of those problems requires us to imagine scientists’ cloning children in order to harvest organs and body parts or producing for later use many Adolf Hitlers or Saddam Husseins. I have no doubt that there will arise mad scientists willing to do these things. After all, they have already created poison gas and conducted grisly experiments on prisoners of war and concentration-camp inmates.

But under what circumstances will such abuses occur? Largely, I think, when the cloned child has no parents. Parents, whether they acquire a child by normal birth, artificial insemination, or adoption, will, in the overwhelming majority of cases, become deeply attached to the infant and care for it without regard to its origin. The parental tie is not infallible — infanticide occurs, and some neonates are abandoned in trash bins — but it is powerful and largely independent of the origin of the child. If cloning is to occur, the central problem is to ensure that it be done only for two- parent families who want a child for their own benefit. We should remember that a clone must be borne by a female; it cannot be given birth in a laboratory. A human mother will carry a human clone; she and her husband will determine its fate. Hardly any parents, I think, would allow their child to be used as an organ bank for defective adults or as the next-generation proxy for a malevolent dictator. If the cloned child is born in the same way as a child resulting from marital congress, can it matter to the parents how it was conceived? And if it does not matter to the parents, should it matter to us?

We already have a kind of clone: identical twins. They are genetically identical humans. I have not heard of any twin’s being used against its will as an unwitting organ bank for its brother or sister. Some may surrender a kidney or bone marrow to their sibling; many may give blood; but none, I think, has been “harvested.” The idea that a cloned infant, born to its mother, would be treated differently is, I think, quite far-fetched.

At some time in the future, science may discover a way to produce a clone entirely in the laboratory. That we should ban. Without human birth, the parents’ attitude toward the infant will be deeply compromised. Getting a clone from a laboratory would be like getting a puppy from a pet store: Both creatures might be charming, but neither would belong in any meaningful emotional sense to the owner. And unclaimed clones would be disposed of the same way as unclaimed puppies — killed.

There may be parents who, out of fear or ideology, can be persuaded to accept a clone of a Hussein in hopes that they can help produce an unending chain of vicious leaders. This is less far-fetched. We already know from the study of identical twins reared in different families that they are remarkably similar. A cloned Hussein would have an IQ close to that of his father and a personality that (insofar as we can measure these things) would have roughly a 50 percent chance of being like his. Each clone would be like an identical twin: nearly the same in appearance, very similar in intelligence and manner, and alike (but not a duplicate) in personality. We know that the environment will have some effect on each twin’s personality, but it is easy to overestimate this. I am struck by how many scientists interested in cloning have reflexively adopted the view that the environment will have a powerful effect on a cloned child. (Cloning seems to have given a large boost to environmentalists.) But that reaction is exaggerated. From the work of Dr. Thomas Bouchard at the University of Minnesota, we know that giving identical twins different environments produces only slightly greater differences in character.

Our best hope for guarding against the duplication of a Saddam Hussein is a practical one. Any cloned offspring would reach maturity 40 or so years after his father was born, and by then so much would have changed — Hussein, Sr. would probably not even be in power, and his country’s political system might have been profoundly altered — that it is unlikely Hussein, Jr. could do what his father did.

We do not know how many parents will request cloning, but some will. Suppose the father cannot provide sperm or the mother is unable to produce a fertilizable egg. Such a family now has only two choices — remain childless or adopt. Cloning would create a third choice: duplicate the father or the mother. Some parents who do not want to remain childless will find this more attractive than adoption, which introduces a wholly new and largely unknown genetic factor into their family tree. Cloning guarantees that the child’s genetic makeup will be identical to that of whichever parent is cloned.

There is, of course, a risk that cloning may increase the number of surrogate mothers, with all of the heartbreak and legal complexities that this entails, but I suspect that surrogates would be no more common for clones than they are for babies conceived in vitro.

More troubling is the possibility that a lesbian couple will use cloning to produce a child. Do we wish to make it easy for a homosexual pair to have children? Governments have different policies on this; let me set aside discussion of this matter for another occasion.

There is one important practical objection to the widespread use of cloning. As every evolutionary scientist knows, the survival of a species depends on two forces — environmental change that rewards some creatures and penalizes others, and sufficient diversity among the species that no matter what the environment, some members of the species will benefit.

Cloning creates the opportunity for people to maximize a valued trait. Suppose we wish to have children with a high IQ, an athletic physique, easily tanned skin, or freedom from a particular genetic disease. By cloning persons who have the desired trait, we can guarantee that the trait will appear in the infant.

This may make good sense to parents, but it is bad news for the species. We have no way of knowing what environmental challenges will confront us in the future. Traits that today are desirable may become irrelevant or harmful in the future; traits that now are unappealing may become essential for human survival in the centuries ahead.

This problem is one for which there is no obvious individual solution. People maximizing the welfare of their infant can inhibit the welfare of the species. One way to constrain a couple’s efforts to secure the “perfect” child would be to restrict their choice of genes to either the father or the mother. They could secure a specific genetic product, but they could not obtain what they might think is the ideal product.

But the real constraint on the misuse of cloning comes from a simple human tendency. Many parents do not want a child with particular traits. Conception is a lottery. It produces an offspring that gets roughly half of its genes from its father and half from its mother, but the mixture occurs in unpredictable and fascinating combinations. All parents spend countless delightful hours wondering whether the child has its mother’s eyes or its father’s smile or its grandfather’s nose or its grandmother’s personality. And they watch in wonder as the infant becomes an adult with its own unique personality and mannerisms.

I think that most people prefer the lottery to certainty. (I know they prefer sex to cloning.) Lured by the lottery, they help meet the species’s need for biological diversity. Moreover, if parents are tempted by certainty but limited to cells taken from either the father or the mother, they will have to ask themselves hard questions.

Do I want another man like the father, who is smart and earns a lot — but whose hair is receding, who has diabetes, and who is so obsessed with work that he is not much fun on weekends? Or do I want another woman like the mother, who is bright and sweet — but who has bad teeth, a family risk of breast cancer, and sleeps too late in the morning?

Not many of us know perfect people, least of all our own parents. If we want to clone a person, most of us will think twice about cloning somebody we already know well. And if we can clone only from among our own family, our desire to do it at all will be much weakened. Perhaps parents’ love of entering the reproductive lottery is itself a revelation of evolution at work, one designed to help maintain biological diversity.

In one special case we may want to clone a creature well known to us. My friend Heather Higgins has said that cloning our pets — or at least some pets — may make sense. I would love to have another Labrador retriever just like Winston and another pair of cats exactly like Sarah and Clementine.

The central question facing those who approach cloning with an open mind is whether the gains from human cloning — a remedy for infertility and substitute for adoption — are worth the risks of farming organs, propagating dictators, and impeding evolution. I think that, provided certain conditions are met, the gains will turn out to exceed the risks.

The conditions are those to which I have already referred. Cloning should be permitted only on behalf of two married partners, and the mother should — absent some special medical condition that doctors must certify — carry the fertile tissue to birth. Then the offspring would belong to the parents. This parental constraint would prevent organ farming and the indiscriminate or political misuse of cloning technology.

The major threat cloning produces is a further weakening of the two-parent family. Cloning humans, if it can occur at all, cannot be prevented, but cloning unmarried persons will expand the greatest cultural problem our country now faces. A cloned child, so far as we now know, cannot be produced in a laboratory. A mother must give it birth. Dolly had a mother, and if humans are produced the same way, they will have mothers, also. But not, I hope, unmarried mothers. Indeed, given the likely expense and difficulty of cloning, and the absence from it of any sexual pleasure, we are unlikely to see many unmarried teenage girls choosing that method. If unmarried cloning occurs, it is likely to be among affluent persons who think they are entitled to act without the restraints and burdens of family life. They are wrong.

Of course an unmarried or unscrupulous person eager for a cloned offspring may travel from the United States to a place where there are no restrictions of the sort I suggest. There is no way to prevent this. We can try to curtail it by telling anyone who returns to this country with a child born abroad to an American citizen that one of two conditions must be met before the child will be regarded as an American citizen. The parent bringing it back must show by competent medical evidence either that the child is the product of a normal (non-cloned) birth or adoption or that the child, though the product of cloning, belongs to a married couple who will be responsible for it. Failing this, the child could not become an American citizen. But of course some people would evade any restrictions. There is, in short, no way that American law can produce a fail-safe restraint on undesirable cloning.

My view — that cloning presents no special ethical risks if society does all in its power to establish that the child is born to a married woman and is the joint responsibility of the married couple — will not satisfy those whose objections to cloning are chiefly religious. If man is made in the image of God, can man make himself (by cloning) and still be in God’s image? I would suggest that producing a fertilized egg by sexual contact does not uniquely determine that image and therefore that non-sexual, in vitro fertilization is acceptable. And if this is so, then non-sexually transplanting cell nuclei into enucleated eggs might also be acceptable.

This is not a view that will commend itself to many devout Christians or Jews. I would ask of them only that they explain what it is about sexual fertilization that so affects God’s judgment about the child that results.