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David Spates Cloning ensures that we'll
You can't count on people to do the right
thing. To make matters more complex, you can't even count on
people to arrive at a consensus as to what the right thing is. Sometime soon, a scientist will clone a human
being in a laboratory. You can bank on it. For all I know, that
scientist has already done it. The world's first human clone
may be at this very moment enjoying the Terrible 2's. If it hasn't
happened, it will. If it has happened, I'm not the least bit
surprised. How will humanity handle this Godlike ability?
That's the million-dollar question, and there's no multiple choice
at the bottom of the screen. The Chinese were brutal with this
curse: "May you live in interesting times." "'Frankenstein doctors' ripped for promise
to clone humans" was the headline tucked away in the Sunday
paper's lead section. Researchers, who were meeting in Rome,
have promised they will clone babies. In response to their vow,
a Roman legislator labeled them "Frankenstein doctors"
and urged his country's governing body to ratify an international
pact banning human cloning. After the name-calling has settled down, after
the accusatory fingers have been pointed, and after some well-meaning
countries have signed a hollow pact, the clones will come. It
may not happen in my lifetime, but I'd be surprised if it doesn't. The cloning team apparently has painted a
picture in which cloning would be used to help infertile couples
become parents. Well, that's all fine and dandy, but the reasons
scientists will pursue human cloning don't matter too much. They're
going to do it - the reasons are relatively insignificant. Allow me to paint another picture. Ten years from now, let's say your child needs
a new heart. A donor cannot be found in time, and your physician
tells you that his hospital can clone a heart in the lab. In
all the ways that matter, it would be an exact duplicate of your
child's heart, grown to the precise size as needed. All the doctor
would need to grow the heart would be a sample of your child's
DNA, which is retrieved from a blood sample. Would you do it?
Of course you would. Any parent would. Now, imagine the same scenario, but in this
one the doctor says he can clone the heart but in order to do
so he must also clone all of the torso's organs. For whatever
medical reason, that's just the way the technology works. In
order to clone a heart, the doctor must also clone a connecting
pair of lungs, stomach, pancreas, small intestine, the whole
deal. Once the heart is ready to be transplanted to your child,
the rest of the unneeded organs are tossed away into the scrap
bucket. Would you do it? Sure you would, even though it's kind
of creepy to think about all those wasted organs. Now, again, same scenario. This time, the
doctor says an entire human must be cloned before a suitable
heart can be made, but the human wouldn't have a brain. No consciousness
ever. The clone looks human, but without a brain running the
show, there's no awareness, no speech, no vision, no hearing,
no anything. It's little more than a collection of organs in
human form. The doctor can accelerate the growth, thereby creating
an exact replica of your child, minus the brain. Once the heart
is ready and transplanted into your child, the brainless clone,
which is of no use to anyone now and would never have been a
functional human anyway, is tossed into the scrap bucket. Would
you do it to save your child's life? Now we're getting into tough
territory. Is it a person? Does it have a soul, anima, spirit
or whatever you prefer to call the human lifeforce? The answer
isn't so obvious, is it? Last scenario, and you probably have an idea
where this one is going. Same circumstances, but the only way
to generate the needed heart for your child is to create a fully
functional clone, brain and all. After accelerated growth in
the lab, it's a walking, talking, smiling exact duplicate of
your child, minus your child's life experiences of course. Same
hair, same dimples, same eyes and, most importantly, same heart.
Since it was grown in a lab in a matter of months or weeks, it
can't speak and has no sense of awareness beyond that of an infant
of the same age. It may look like your 11-year-old, but it has
no more brain development than that of a 3-month-old, the same
development your child had at 3 months old, I might add. For
your child to have the clone's heart, obviously the clone must
die. What do you do? We're talking about your child here, but
we're also talking about your child there. All caring parents
say they would do anything to save the lives of their children,
but does anything really mean anything? Do you have the right
to do anything you want with your family's genetic material?
What rights do you have? What rights would a clone have? Would
cutting into a clone's chest and taking his heart constitute
murder? If you decided not to go ahead with the cloning, how
would you feel when your child died with his bad heart? I don't have the answers. I'm content to sit
at my keyboard thinking up hypothetical dilemmas. |