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Even if we could agree on which individuals would serve as humanity's templates of perfection, there's no guarantee that successive copies would be everything the originals were. Innate genius isn't always so innate, after all, coming to nothing if the person born with the potential for excellence doesn't find the right environment and blossom in it. A scientific genius who's beaten as a child might become a mad genius. An artist who's introduced to alcohol when he's young might merely become a drunk. A thousand track switches have to click in sequence for the child who starts out toward greatness to wind up there. If a single one clicks wrong, the high-speed rush toward a Nobel Prize can dead-end in a makeshift shack in the Montana woods. Says Rabbi Moshe Tendler, professor of both biology and biblical law at Yeshiva University in New York City: "I can make myself an Albert Einstein, and he may turn out to be a drug addict."
The despot will not be coming to the cloning lab today. Before long, he knows, the lab's science will come to him--and not a moment too soon. The despot has ruled his little country for 30 years, but now he's getting old and will have to pass his power on. That makes him nervous; he's seen what can happen to a cult of personality if too weak a personality takes over. Happily, in his country that's not a danger. As soon as the technology of the cloning lab goes global--as it inevitably must--his people can be assured of his leadership long after he's gone.
This is the ultimate nightmare scenario. The Pharaohs built their pyramids, the Emperors built Rome, and Napoleon built his Arc de Triomphe--all, at least in part, to make the permanence of stone compensate for the impermanence of the flesh. But big buildings and big tombs would be a poor second choice if the flesh could be made to go on forever. Now, it appears, it can.
The idea of a dictator's being genetically duplicated is not new--not in pop culture, anyhow. In Ira Levin's 1976 book The Boys from Brazil a zealous ex-Nazi bred a generation of literal Hitler Youth--boys cloned from cells left behind by the Fuhrer. Woody Allen dealt with a similar premise a lot more playfully in his 1973 film Sleeper, in which a futuristic tyrant is killed by a bomb blast, leaving nothing behind but his nose--a nose that his followers hope to clone into a new leader. Even as the fiction of one decade becomes the technology of another, it's inevitable that this technology will be used--often by the wrong people.
"I don't see how you can stop these things," says bioethicist Daniel Callahan of the Hastings Center in Briarcliff Manor, New York. "We are at the mercy of these technological developments. Once they're here, it's hard to turn back."
Hard, perhaps, but not impossible. If anything will prevent human cloning--whether of dictator, industrialist or baby daughter--from becoming a reality, it's that science may not be able to clear the ethical high bar that would allow basic research to get under way in the first place. Cutting, coring and electrically jolting a sheep embryo is a huge moral distance from doing the same to a human embryo. It took 277 trials and errors to produce Dolly the sheep, creating a cellular body count that would look like sheer carnage if the cells were human. "Human beings ought never to be used as experimental subjects," Shapiro says simply.