Bill Frist, majority leader of the Senate, has decided to break with the Bush Administration and support embryonic stem-cell research (see this thread: “Bill Frist embraces science, rejects Bush.” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=327834)
In a discussion of this story today on All Things Considered, the reporter mentioned the relevance of cloning, adding, “of course, not cloning to make a human baby – everybody’s against that!”
Why? What’s so scary about the possibility of human clones, that the Clinton Administration banned all research along those lines and everybody seems to feel the same way? A clone is some person’s younger twin brother/sister, nothing more.
Setting aside the philosophical and deeper issues, I guess the simple fact, that normal babies won’t be the outcome from the get go, poses an ethical dilemma.
I’ve never understood this either. Of course (obligatory disclaimer) human cloning is at present unethical, because the risks of creating a baby with severe health problems are too great. But cloning per se poses no new ethical problems. Sure, cloning has an ethical component, but they are the same objections raised for identical twins, adoption, surrogate motherhood, egg donation, sperm donation, in vitro fertillization, unfit parenting, and involunary servitude.
Clones won’t be property or owned by corporations, they are human babies. Clones won’t be soul-less any more than identical twins are soul-less. Clones will always have legal parents, just like babies created by in vitro fertilization always have parents, even if the legal parents aren’t always the genetic parents or the gestational parents. Parents might have unrealistic expectations of clones, but they can have unrealistic expectations of conventional babies. Clones have to be gestated in a human mother, they can’t be grown in vats, and if they could be grown in vats then all babies could be grown in uterine replicators.
I think that discursive analysis inadvertently hits it on the head, Lemur: “Surrogate motherhood” . . . “genetic parents” . . . “gestational parents” . . . “uterine replicators” . . . Human cloning just raises too many issues most people would rather not even think about!
Hospitals are anti-evolutionary. Heck, I could argue that agriculture is anti-evolutionary. “Narcissistic” in another issue, but not one that I think rises to the level of “unethical”, anymore than mirrors on a bedroom ceiling or pushing your kid to go into the same profession as you are unethical in and of themselves.
There is of course the “Would clones be property?” question (cue promo for The Island) but hopefully this is a question we answered back in the 19th century (cue promo for Roots). But there are finer shades of that question that aren’t as cut-and-dried. For example, would it be ethical to grow a clone and harvest it for replacement organs, if you took steps to ensure that the clone’s brain never developed? Would such a clone be deserving of the same legal protections as any other human being, despite the lack of a brain? That strikes me as a disputable point either way, to say the least (cue promo for any news footage concerning Terry Schiavo in the past year).
I doubt that most people even know of that kind of stuff. Think of the depiction of clones in pop culture: Someone gets cloned, and bam! you got an exact duplicate of them with the same memories, personality and knowledge. That’s scary as hell, and that’s what a lot of people are afraid of.
Okay, I thought of another “anti”–cloning reduces human life to the status of a physical object or resource, just like when parents have another child so they can save the older one who is dying of cancer. It’s hard to build a meaningful life when you come into the world just to be a smorgasboard of organs. People who make human clones don’t care about the life of the new person they’re creating; they just want a little them, or else they want to use the clone’s DNA or organs for something. There is no reason otherwise to have a clone as compared to a standard-issue baby.
I can’t think for one argument for human cloning that does not have a narcissistic basis. Even the “saving a life” argument wrt organs/bone marrow tissue doesn’t hold water for me. If you clone a cancer-ridden child to provide organs, you’ll just have another cancer-ridden child ten years down the road. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t help children with cancer, just that cloning for that reason just makes more cancer later. And since that was really the only “altruistic” reason I could think of to make a clone, I think it’s pretty clear that I’m against the whole venture.
To turn the debate around, answer this: why SHOULD we have human cloning? What are the benefits? Is it just a matter of “it’s my body, I’ll clone it if I want to”?
It’s certainly more ethical than making a clone with a brain. I don’t think I would be against that, as long as there was no way the clone could grow up and figure out the reason for its creation.
I agree. It’s this cartoon or [bad] SciFi movie charicature that has a lot of people scared. Or, the 'ick" factor. But test tube babies were once thought to be odd, too. I suspect that if cloning is ever perfected as a viable reproductive option, people will get used to it fairly quickly, too.
Cloning, like any technology, can be used for good or bad purpose.
Evolution does not happen in one generation. And child-rearing is by nature at least a little narcissistic, isn’t it? Don’t most parents hope their kids grow up to be like them?
That presumes that there’s no other reason to want a clone, other than to harvest bits of it for medical treatments.
Since no is actually cloning any humans at the moment, how can you know their motivations for doing so?
This presumes that cancer is 100% genetic. I don’t think that current research bears that out, just yet.
Okay, how about this. You have two parents who both carry the gene for a particular disease, but it is not active in either of them. They want kids, but because of this disease, there’s only a one in four chance of the kid living past infancy. They have one kid the normal way, and are lucky enough that he doesn’t have the disease. Since they want more kids, they can just clone the one they have instead of gambling that their next kid won’t be so lucky. Or, they could not take a chance on the disease at all, and just clone one or the other of themselves. Or one clone each of both of them, and raise them as twins.
Cloning would make reproduction for single parents easier, too. If it can be determined that intelligence and excellence have a strong genetic component, it would be to the benefit of society in general to clone its scientific, artistic, and/or industrial leaders. That’s three reasons just off the top of my head, and I’m sure it doesn’t end there.
It’s simply one reproductive option if you are unable to have kids the old fashioned way. Why is a clone any more narcissistic than just having a child in the first place? Sheesh, look at how many William James Smith IIIs there are out there. People cloning a cat are likely to think they’re getting an exact copy. Anyone cloning himself most likely just wants a kid. If he wants an exact duplicate, he’s going to be sorely disapointed.
Who are you to judge the motications of someone who wants a child?
What about adoption? Gets you another kid without having to tamper with nature at all. But then, most adoptees are not healthy white babies; the unconditional love of a child just won’t mean as much if he’s not physically related to you, right? To me, dicking around with cloning to make kids is like saying your genes are SO great that you want to invest in an insanely expensive (cloning a CAT now costs around 40k, do you know how many people can be fed with that?) treatment just to pass them on, instead of using that money to adopt, sponsor, or otherwise help pre-existing children from the mud races. Before all the rich people jump all up on me, I think you have the right to spend money as you wish, but I also think I have the right to call you a narcissist/racist/etc for it.
Also, wrt the hypothetical disease that kills three in four–won’t the bio-kid of the couple have to deal with being a carrier a few decades down the line? Will he/she have any option reproduction-wise but to clone themself, so as not to pass on the gene? So the gene gets passed on down the line, and no new genetic material is introduced into the line. Instead of nipping the gene in the bud by refusing to have more children, the original couple has helped to propagate it.
I think it would be even more dangerous for single people to have cloned children. Can you imagine the pressure? Your only adult role model looks exactly like you. Identical twins form special bonds with one another, but that is okay because they are equals. To have that kind of a special bond with a parent seems obscene.
WRT cloning of scientists, etc, I think it is far more likely that cancer has a direct genetic link than intelligence/creativity. I think nurture is far more influential than nature when it comes to smarts. Also, again, the pressure. Children already strive to out-perform their parents. A clone would constantly be trying to prove his/her worth compared to its gene-source. Since the bar is set SO high, there is a high likelihood of failure, and while all children have to deal with the fear of disappointing their parents, I think it would be far worse to be a failure with the genes of Einstein. Because even though I think intelligence is mostly environmental, some people don’t, and they’d fault the kid for wasting his genes. And what if Einstein II wanted to be a fashion designer or a pilot or a nurse? Would he have free rein over his future (or do you think choice of occupation is coded in the genes as well)?
There are Einstein-level geniuses being born today, and there will be in the future. We should be investing in those people now, not looking to the past to find geniuses.
And that sore disappointment will have a grave impact on the clone’s mental health. You say it’s “most likely” that people will use this an an alternative baby-making process, but what about the cases where the parent is clearly trying to make a mini-me? I think the emotional suffering of those hypothetical future children is enough argument against cloning.
It is more narcissistic because the parent doesn’t want to leave anything to chance. They are coming out and saying “sorry, but NO genetic drift will be tolerable, NO random mutations will be accepted, this is what I want (this is where he slaps down a picture of himself as a baby), hop to it!” It’s commodifying the human body.
What if someone who carries the gene for infertility clones themself? Is that not an example of a non-viable trait getting passed on, possibly with bad results (since offspring will have no choice but to clone, creating more infertiles, creating more clones…)?
Agreed. The foundations of our civilizations are nothing more than a product of our very social nature, which is our species’ primary survival advantage. Without the capacity to form the inordinately complex social structures that we have (which have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, mind you) we would not have survived to even discuss cloning, much less consider it a real possibility. As to continuity eror’s remark, that would simply be another method of reproduction, albeit a very poor one, and most likely an evolutionary dead end.
So where do you draw the line? As John Mace pointed out there are more than enough children already produced who are intended to be mini-mes. Do you suggest that we legislate to render those people infertile as well? What is your cut-off line, and why did you draw it there? Why do you believe that the children of overbearing parents who want to clone themselves will be subjected to less trauma when they are less like their parent than a clone would be? Seems to me like exactly the opposite would be true.
Or alternatively we could postulate that such parents were already narcissistic and weren’t made so because cloning was made legal. Wouldn’t that be the more reasonable conclusion?
And since they were already narcissistic they would have wanted their offspring to be copies of themselves even if they weren’t clones? Isn’t that also reasonable?
And such people will be disappointed if their offspring don’t measure up to their opinions of themselves physically or mentally, whether the offspring are clones or not. Doesn’t that seem reasonable?
However clones are far more likely to measure up at least physically than a product of sexual reproduction. Isn’t that fact?
So a cloned child of such a parent is actually less likely to endure emotional suffering than natural child? Isn’t that the logical conclusion?
It seems that if we are going to allow such narcissistic people to have children (and I can’t see how we could stop them) then the best means of minimising emotional suffering for the children is to allow them to be clones rather than the product of sexual reproduction.
This all seems to be an argument in favour of legalising cloning, not against it.
Oh dear.
Sorry, but this is just one step from “Won’t somebody think of the children!” The human body is already commodified. We all rent ours out by the hour to strangers. We make it look pretty and lead others to believe they could use it to get what we want. Adults compromise their lives and negotiate with each other to use one another’s bodies sexually. People plan their pregnancies and their surgery to fit in with their work lives or the school year.
Wake up and smell the roses, the human body is already a commodity and has been since we started banging rocks together. If you don’t believe that then try to think of one thing that you could want to do with a living body that you couldn’t pay someone to do? I bet you can’t do it. Insofar as any sane desire pertaining to the human body can be obtained with money the human body has already become as objectified as it possibly can be.
So any complaint that something will objectify the human body carries no weight, firstly because it has already been objectified and secondly because objectification of the body is not an inherently bad thing, which is why we all do it to our own body and the bodies of everyone else.
Can’t this exact argument be applied to all medicine?
What if someone who carries the gene for diabetes doesn’t die in childhood because of insulin injections and lives to have children? Is that not an example of a non-viable trait getting passed on, possibly with bad results (since offspring will have a high probability of needing insulin, creating more diabetics, needing more insulin…)?
What if someone who carries the gene for myopia doesn’t die in childhood because of eyeglasses and lives to have children? Is that not an example of a non-viable trait getting passed on, possibly with bad results (since offspring will have a high probability of needing eyeglasses, creating more myopics, creating more eyeglasses…)?
This is just psuedo-science run amok in social policy. By this argument we should outlaw all potentially life-saving medicine and abandon our fates to the law of the jungle. Only in that way can we be sure that no ‘inferior’ genes are being replicated creating a future need for ever more medical intervention.