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In a culture in which not everyone sees things so straightforwardly, however, some ethical accommodation is going to have to be reached. How it will be done is anything but clear. "Science is close to crossing some horrendous boundaries," says Leon Kass, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago. "Here is an opportunity for human beings to decide if we're simply going to stand in the path of the technological steamroller or take control and help guide its direction."
Following the local industrialist on the appointments list is the physics laureate. He is terminally ill. When he dies, one of the most remarkable minds in science will die with him. Reproductive chance might one day produce another scientist just as gifted, but there is no telling when. The physics laureate does not like that kind of uncertainty. He has come to the cloning lab today to see if he can't do something about it.
If the human gene pool can be seen as a sort of species-wide natural resource, it's only sensible for the rarest of those genes to be husbanded most carefully, preserved so that every generation may enjoy their benefits. Even the most ardent egalitarians would find it hard to object to an Einstein appearing every 50 years or a Chopin every century. It would be better still if we could be guaranteed not just an Einstein but the Einstein. If a scientific method were developed so that the man who explained general relativity in the first half of the century could be brought back to crack the secrets of naked singularities in the second, could we resist using it? And suppose the person being replicated were researching not just abstruse questions of physics but pressing questions of medicine. Given the chance to bring back Jonas Salk, would it be moral not to try?
Surprisingly, scientific ethicists seem to say yes. "Choosing personal characteristics as if they were options on a car is an invitation to misadventure," says John Paris, professor of bioethics at Boston College. "It is in the diversity of our population that we find interest and enthusiasm."
Complicating things further, the traits a culture values most are not fixed. If cloning had existed a few centuries ago, men with strong backs and women with broad pelvises would have been the first ones society would have wanted to reproduce. During the industrial age, however, brainpower began to count for more than muscle power. Presumably the custodians of cloning technology at that historical juncture would have faced the prospect of letting previous generations of strapping men and fecund women die out and replacing them with a new population of intellectual giants. "What is a better human being?" asks Boston University ethicist George Annas. "A lot of it is just fad."