Full-Blown Human Cloning is Inevitable, says Nature
February 22, 2007
This month is the 10-year anniversary of the momentous announcement that Dolly the sheep had been cloned. Her fatuous name (a foray into locker-room humor) and ever-placid face were soon familiar to billions of humans. And her human creators were quick to point out that they would never dream of doing this to a member of their own species.
Well, one of the few certainties of the modern world is the Law of Ethical Entropy. Find the strongest declaration you can that something should and will never happen, add 10 years, and you know what you get. And despite Nature’s deployment of one of the most tendentious and morally bankrupt statements I have ever read (“There is a consensus that dignity is not undermined if a human offspring is valued in its own right and not merely as a means to an end”) it is still widely agreed by people left, right and center that we do not ever want human babies to be cloned. Nature now tells us that this is inevitable, and perhaps it is – like the next flu pandemic. But that does not mean we either welcome it or use it as an opportunity to write supine editorials (whose is the “consensus” of which Nature speaks?).
Meanwhile, the main debate still focuses on making cloned embryos for research. 1997 was just three years after the Washington Post declared that it would be “unconscionable” to create embryos for research; and in 1997 itself the European Convention on Human Rights and Bioethics was opened for signature, which turns the the Post’s repugnance into international law by prohibiting signatories form creating embryos for research.
In contrast, what has been universally deemed as unacceptable is the pursuit of human reproductive cloning – or the production of what some have called a delayed identical twin. Here, the two issues that have dominated the discussion have been dignity and safety. There is a consensus that dignity is not undermined if a human offspring is valued in its own right and not merely as a means to an end. But there is no consensus that we will eventually know enough about cloning for the risks of creating human clones to be so small as to be ethically acceptable.
The debate may seem to have been pre-empted by prompt prohibition. But as the science of epigenetics and of development inevitably progresses, those for whom cloning is the only means to bypass sterility or genetic disease, say, will increasingly demand its use. Unless there is some unknown fundamental biological obstacle, and given wholly positive ethical motivations, human reproductive cloning is an eventual certainty.
