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Why? Not just because it is so easy, but because its potential for good is so immense. The study of cloning can give the world deep insights into such puzzles as spinal cords, heart muscle and brain tissue that won't regenerate after injury, or cancer cells that revert to embryonic stage and multiply uncontrollably. Replicating Wilmut's work will elucidate what he along the way did right that nature, in these pathologies, does wrong.
Of course, the potential for evil is infinitely greater. But there will be no stopping that either. Ban human cloning in America, as in England, and it will develop on some island of Dr. Moreau. The possibilities are as endless as they are ghastly: human hybrids, clone armies, slave hatcheries, "delta" and "epsilon" sub-beings out of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
But you don't have to be mad to be tantalized. Being human will do. Think of it: what Dolly--fat, insensible Dolly--promises is not quite a second chance at life (you don't reproduce yourself; you just reproduce a twin) but another soul's chance at your life. Every parent tries to endow his child with the wisdom of his own hard-earned experience. Here is the opportunity to pour all the accumulated learning of your life back into a new you, to raise your exact biological double, to guide your very flesh through a second existence.
Oh, the temptation to know what might have been. Or to produce an Einstein, a Dr. King, for every generation. Or to raise a Jefferson in a clearing, a cross between Jurassic Park and Williamsburg, an artificial environment re-creating 18th century Virginia. Create, nurture and wait. Then bring him out one day, fully grown, to answer the question of the ages: What would Jefferson do today?
--CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER