THE recent cloning of a sheep raises the possibility that the cloning of human beings will also be possible in the near future. People feel instinctively repelled by the idea.
I have read many articles, that sound dire warnings along the lines: "If it can be done, it twill be done." The idea that mad/bad dictators will develop a taste for having themselves cloned is frequently mentioned.
And finally the charged is made that science has once again raced ahead of society's ability to devise ethical guidelines.
If you made a clone of yourself, would the clone be an identical copy? The answer is no, for two reasons - developmental noise and history of interaction with the environment.
Cloning is initiated when a single cell is triggered to begin a developmental process that eventually produces a new human being.
This development is an extremely complex process involving billions of cell divisions and precisely orchestrated patterns of events. Such complex processes inevitably suffer attrition from random mistakes and imprecisions - developmental noise. If you cloned yourself twice, using two identical cells to start off with, the two clones would differ slightly from each other, and also from you.
We are not entirely determined by our genes. The environment also plays an important part, in particular the social and psychological conditions we experience as we are reared.
Your clone would differ slightly from you physically because of developmental noise. But in order to stand a good chance of being very like you in other ways, i.e. emotionally, psychologically, etc., your clone would have to be raised under conditions very similar to your own history.
Readers may remember the film, The Boys from Brazil (1978), starring Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier. Peck played the evil Nazi, Dr Josef Mengele, who fled to Brazil, accompanied by some scientific colleagues, after the war. They took some of Hitler's tissue with them, from which they cloned a new Adolf.
The story was technically quite accurate. They knew that to produce an adult Hitler in all his old "glory" they would have to rear the clone in a manner quite close to Hitler's upbringing. The film is well worth watching, although Peck's performance with stilted English is unintentionally comical. Olivier is excellent as a Jewish Nazi hunter.
It is, of course, by no means out of the question that fanatical followers of a dictator, or of a beloved holy leader, would attempt to make a clone after the leader passed on, if the technique of cloning humans becomes available. But they would be well advised not to bother.
It is quite likely that many of the characteristics, e.g. driving ambition, that mark out some people for greatness or for notoriety, are determined more by environmental factors than by genetic predisposition. It will not be possible to know all the important environmental factors, and even if it were, it would be impossible to duplicate many of them. Thus, for example, Adolf Hitler's clone might resemble the original in many ways, but yet lack that essential magnetic element essential to his overall "success".
Would the clone of a human being be itself fully human? I can think of no reason why not. My understanding of the scientific aspects of cloning is that the process produces a fully functional biological organism. I would imagine that one could no more separate the normal human spirit from a functional human organism than one could separate the property of "wetness" from liquid water. And from the religious point of view, I can see no more difficulty with the clone having his/her own individual soul than I can see with identical twins having individual souls.
And now we come to the ethical issue. Would it be ethical to clone a human being? Since the clone would be fully human, this clearly rules out, on ethical grounds, any cloning of humans for exploitative purposes, such as spare body parts or cloning of leaders to continue a dynasty.
But what about cloning in circumstances where motivation is good? Take, for example, a couple whose only child is dying of an incurable disease. For some reason, the couple are unable to have further children by any conventional method. Would they bed ethically justified to clone the dying child?
I suppose the only really honest thing I can say about the ethics of cloning human beings under any circumstances is that I am not sure. However, in so far as I have pondered this matter my tentative conclusion is that cloning of human beings would be, in itself, an unethical act.
Human beings are designed to reproduce through the sexual union of male and female. We are each equipped with a strong sexual appetite in order to ensure that enough of us indulge in enough sex to ensure the continuance of the species.
A child is a genetic mixture of both parents, and unless the child is an identical twin, is genetically different to any individual who has ever lived, or who will ever live.
By my personal ethical standards, a human conception should be the wanted outcome of an act of sexual union between mature adults, where both partners undertake a commitment to love and care for the child. I believe that any significant departure from the spirit of this principle would be unethical.
The cloning of a human being would be a completely different process. No sexual appetite, no loving union of two people, and no genetic mixing would be involved. The child would be as close a genetic copy of its single parent as it is possible to be, and not a genetically unique.
Cloning would also, for the first time, create a different class of human from a genetic point of view - a copy as distinct from a variant.
I believe that clones would inevitably be discriminated against. We at present live in a world in which you can suffer discrimination n the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, etc. You can be discriminated against on the basis of your postal address. I think it is a safe bet that clones would be treated differently from variants.
Nowadays, it often seems that science is racing ahead and producing ethical dilemmas faster than society can solve them. However, an alternative explanation is that the ethicists are moving at a snail's pace.
Frogs were cloned 30 years ago, making it virtually certain that the technique would shortly be perfected for mammals. Surely 30 years is long enough to tease out many of the thorny ethical questions. And yet, very little teasing out appears to have been done.
And who are the ethicists? At least three groups spring to mind who should be involved in setting ethical guidelines - scientists, religious specialists, and philosophers. The matter cannot be left to scientists alone because of a rather obvious conflict of interest.
Moral theologians would have had a major say in this area in the past. Their influence has declined, but they still have an obligation to speak out clearly.
And finally, all of our universities have philosophy departments. Here is very important, practical and appropriate work for them, but are they doing it? I hear very little from them. Perhaps they take the attitude of Oscar Wilde: "Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development."
I will return shortly to the important general matter of ethics in science.