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Also waiting in the cloning lab this morning is the local industrialist. Unlike the Midwestern parents, he does not have a sick child to worry about; indeed, he has never especially cared for children. Lately, however, he has begun to feel different. With a little help from the cloning lab, he now has the opportunity to have a son who would bear not just his name and his nose and the color of his hair but every scrap of genetic coding that makes him what he is. Now that appeals to the local industrialist. In fact, if this first boy works out, he might even make a few more.
Of all the reasons for using the new technology, pure ego raises the most hackles. It's one thing to want to be remembered after you are gone; it's quite another to manufacture a living monument to ensure that you are. Some observers claim to be shocked that anyone would contemplate such a thing. But that's naive--and even disingenuous. It's obvious that a lot of people would be eager to clone themselves.
"It's a horrendous crime to make a Xerox of someone," argues author and science critic Jeremy Rifkin. "You're putting a human into a genetic straitjacket. For the first time, we've taken the principles of industrial design--quality control, predictability--and applied them to a human being."
But is it really the first time? Is cloning all that different from genetically engineering an embryo to eliminate a genetic disease like cystic fibrosis? Is it so far removed from in vitro fertilization? In both those cases, after all, an undeniable reductiveness is going on, a shriveling of the complexity of the human body to the certainty of a single cell in a Petri dish. If we accept this kind of tinkering, can't we accept cloning? Harvard neurobiologist Lisa Geller admits that intellectually, she doesn't see a difference between in vitro technology and cloning. "But," she adds, "I admit it makes my stomach feel nervous."
More palatable than the ego clone to some bioethicists is the medical clone, a baby created to provide transplant material for the original. Nobody advocates harvesting a one-of-a-kind organ like a heart from the new child--an act that would amount to creating the clone just to kill it. But it's hard to argue against the idea of a family's loving a child so much that it will happily raise another, identical child so that one of its kidneys or a bit of its marrow might allow the first to live. "The reasons for opposing this are not easy to argue," says John Fletcher, former ethicist for the NIH.
The problem is that once you start shading the cloning question--giving an ethical O.K. to one hypothetical and a thumbs-down to another--you begin making the sort of ad hoc hash of things the Supreme Court does when it tries to define pornography. Suppose you could show that the baby who was created to provide marrow for her sister would forever be treated like a second-class sibling--well cared for, perhaps, but not well loved. Do you prohibit the family from cloning the first daughter, accepting the fact that you may be condemning her to die? Richard McCormick, a Jesuit priest and professor of Christian ethics at the University of Notre Dame, answers such questions simply and honestly when he says, "I can't think of a morally acceptable reason to clone a human being."