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Husband and wives who have been through in-vitro fertilization with some embryos left over have had to wrestle with the fact that they have a potential human being stored on ice. There are already 10,000 frozen embryos floating around in liquid-nitrogen baths in the U.S., stuck in a kind of icy limbo as their would-be parents sort out the options. Do they let the embryos thaw out and die? Do they give them away? Do they have the right to sell embryos to the highest bidder? And who gets custody -- or the cash -- in a divorce?
When the profit motive enters into the equation, ethical considerations tend to be forgotten. And private profit drives the infertility business in the U.S. "We are one of the few countries in the world where you can sell sperm and eggs," said George Annas, a medical ethicist at Boston University. There are already catalogs that list the characteristics of sperm donors -- including one made up of Nobel prizewinners. Without regulation, it will only be a matter of time, said Annas, before some entrepreneur tries to market embryos derived from Michael Jordan or Cindy Crawford.
"This is the dawn of the eugenics era," declared Jeremy Rifkin, founder of the Foundation on Economic Trends, a biotechnology-watchdog group in Washington. Painting a dark picture of "standardized human beings produced in whatever quantity you want, in an assembly-line procedure," Rifkin organized protests last week outside George Washington University and other reproductive-research institutions.
Rifkin, however, was the exception. Few people seemed to be thinking of the Brave New World visions in which a totalitarian government creates whole subclasses of clones designed expressly for particular tasks. As Annas pointed out, there are better ways to create a crack Navy SEAL team or an astronaut corps than to clone the appropriate mix of sperm and egg and wait 20 years. "Maybe if this were Nazi Germany, we would worry more about the government," said Annas. "But we're in America, where we have the private market. We don't need government to make the nightmare scenario come true."
Most people seemed to respond to the idea of human cloning at a more fundamental level. In the TIME/CNN poll, 58% said they thought cloning was morally wrong, while 63% said they believed it was against God's will. "It's not that anyone thinks there is a commandment 'Thou shalt not clone,' " said Margaret O'Brien Steinfels of Commonweal magazine. "But there are limits to what humans ought to be thinking about doing." For many, the basic sanctity of human life seemed to be under attack, and it made them angry. "The people doing this ought to contemplate splitting themselves in half and see how they like it," said Germain Grisez, a professor of Christian ethics at Mount Saint Mary's College in Emmitsburg, Maryland.
The reaction from around the world was, in may ways, even more heated. "This is not research," snapped Dr. Jean-Francois Mattei of Timone Hospital in Marseilles, France. "It's aberrant, showing a lack of a sense of reality and respect for people." In Germany, Professor Hans-Bernhard Wuermeling, a medical ethicist at the University of Erlangen, was equally repelled by the notion of producing clones for spare parts, calling it "a modern form of slavery."