I Think I'm a Clone Now
by Rob Milt

At a recent congressional hearing on human cloning, Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, scientific director of Clonaid, testified on behalf of couples who want to use cloning techniques to create babies. For a mere $200,000, they will clone a child for you.

Boisselier read a letter by a father whose 11-month old died following heart surgery. "I decided then and there that I would never give up on my child," the letter read. "I would never stop until I could give his DNA — his genetic make-up — a chance."

Was his dead child just DNA writ large, or was his child a unique living-breathing individual? Does he want his dead child to be undead? Or does he want a new child with the same DNA? The details were unclear, but the father's intent was crystal — to bring some incarnation of his son back to the living.

Listening to all of this was bioethicist Thomas Murray, president of the Hastings Center in Garrison, N.Y. and a member of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, established by President Clinton following the creation of Dolly, the first successful cloned mammal. In 1997, the commission concluded that "it is morally unacceptable for anyone ... to attempt to create a child using cloning. In addition to safety concerns, many other serious ethical concerns have been identified, which require much more widespread and careful public deliberation before this technology may be used."

In a recent article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Murray pointed out two important facts about human cloning:

1) Cloning does not result in normal, healthy offspring. Major cloning studies report high rates of deformities and death, and some females bearing these offspring have been injured or died.

2) Even if cloning produced healthy babies, these human beings would not be replacements of the originals. How we turn out is a matter of providence, experience and heredity, not an infinitely replicable process but rather something given highly to chance. We are much more than sum of our parts.

In December, 2000, though, Murray encountered perhaps the most compelling rationale against human cloning. Murray had learned his 20-year old daughter, Emily, had been abducted and murdered. An undergraduate at Kenyon College, she was shot once in the head and left in an abandoned trailer in rural Ohio. Cloning could not bring his daughter back, nor ease his family's pain, Murray said. Cloning, no matter how successful, how accurate, could not mitigate his grief. Death is final and abrupt. "There are no technological fixes for sorrow," Murray said.

Scientists who claim they can successfully re-create a human life are blind to the broader implications of their actions. It will not eliminate the sorrow a family experiences or replace the once living. Imagine trying to meet the expectations of parents who hoped you would achieve the same goals as your genetically identical older brother. No individual should have to bear the unrealistic expectation that he or she will live out the life of his genetic counterpart. Would Bill Gates II have the same ruthless creative energy as the original? Perhaps Tiger II would decide to play tennis or focus on a political career.

In a bizarre twist, Emily Murray's accused murderer, Gregory McKnight, faces the death penalty if convicted (he was already convicted of murder as a juvenile). If the state of Ohio puts McKnight to death, should we clone him to give his DNA a "chance"? Should cloning be an equal opportunity proposition? Should cloning only be available to select childless couples under rigorous federal guidelines? Or is human cloning such an abomination, that it should be outlawed?

These are not questions with easy answers. Cloning questions the very meaning of being human, of the uniqueness of life and the finality of death. Before we go forth with the science, we must first be sure about the ethics.

E-mail Rob Milt at rmilt at hotmail dot com.