Ponder Anew 1!

David R. Larson            Loma Linda, California 

A seven-pound healthy baby girl, who was successfully cloned by using DNA from the skin of her thirty-one year old mother, was delivered by Caesarian section on Thursday, December 26, 2002, announced Briggitte Boisselier the following day. The public now knows the infant as "Eve."

Boisselier is the chief executive officer of Clonaid, a company with philosophical ties to the Raelians, a religious group led by Claude Vorilhon, now known as Rael, with about 50,000 members  who reside primarily in France, Canada and Japan. They operate a theme park named "UFOland" near, Montreal, Canada. Rael states that he encountered some "little green space aliens" while visiting the site of a volcano in France in the 1970s who took credit for starting human life on planet Earth. He contends that "Elohim," one of the Hebrew words for God, actually refers to such "non-earthlings from the sky."

Boisselier, a bishop in the Raelian movement, indicates that cloning human infants is the first step in the group’s quest for human immortality. The second step will be to accelerate the physical growth of cloned babies so that they will swiftly become adults. The third will be to "download" the personalities of those who want to live forever into the younger and healthier bodies of the cloned individuals.

Boisselier’s announcement has been greeted with an understandable degree of skepticism and consternation. My own view is that we should not allow ourselves ethically to hyperventilate about these issues. Some are serious. Others border on the hysterical.

A cloned human being is the genetic twin of his or her parent. Twins have been born to and reared by human beings as long as anyone can remember, as have triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets and sextuplets. Generally speaking, though, most people prefer not to have all their offspring at one time. This is like to remain the case!

People who are genetically identical are not the same in every other way as well. We are who we are in large measure because of our genes; however, even small differences in environmental factors also make big differences, as do the various ways we exercise the measure of freedom or self-determination we possess. The idea of replicating people by cloning them is therefore farfetched. Besides, those who are genetically identical share many of the same physical strengths and weaknesses. This might be an advantage in some circumstances; in many others, it could be a disadvantage instead. Even if they were wholly unregulated, therefore, I doubt that there would be a huge demand for the silly services of companies like Clonaid.

Clonaid’s attempts at cloning should be regulated because they are risky, however. Boisselier reports that Eve is healthy.  We can hope that this is the case and that it will continue to be so. Yet there are good reasons to be apprehensive. Some specialists report that one fourth of the animals who are successfully cloned are defective or diseased at birth and others state that the percentage of damaged newborns is actually much higher. Because physical difficulties often emerge as the months and years go by, a cloned animal that is healthy at birth is no guarantee that it will subsequently remain so. In a general sense this is true of all newborns; however, in this case we are talking about major maladies that eventually develop in cloned nonhuman animals, ones that appear related to the fact that they were cloned. Many thoughtful individuals and groups have rightly held that it is not appropriate to impose these risks upon human beings who cannot consent to them in advance. Unless and until other animals can be cloned without these unfortunate outcomes, it is premature to clone human beings, they argue. I agree.

Clonaid’s goal of achieving human immortality is ethically wrong. The desire to live forever is not immoral in principle; however, in fact it is unethical in our circumstances because immortality for some necessarily means diminished lives for others. It is essential that those of us who are now alive eventually die so that subsequent generations can flourish. This would not be the case if we were in the Kingdom of God. We aren’t. We should therefore accept our mortality and put a reasonable limit on our desires for longevity. Daniel Callahan may have set this limit two low when he defined a human life span as eighty or so years; however, he rightly insisted that we come up with a limit that makes sense to us and honor it. In both senses of the term, the goal of achieving human immortality in our circumstances is ethically wrong-headed.

Clonaid’s anticipated method of achieving human immortality by "downloading" the mind of a person in to the brain of a cloned human being is also ethically wrong-headed as well as scientifically questionable. The idea that the brain and the mind are related to each other as are a computer’s hardware and software is becoming as obsolete as the earlier suggestion that they are like the pipes and the music of a great organ! The relationships between the brain and the mind are much more intimate than either of these analogies suggests, helpful though they may be in other respects.

Even if Clonaid’s plans prove possible, they would be ethically unacceptable violations of the cloned individuals whose own personalities would be "deleted" and "replaced" by the recollections, perceptions, anticipations, intentions, motivations and affections of others. For all practical purposes, the cloned individual would be killed so that another person could continue living. Cloned or not, very few people would give free, informed and voluntary consent to such treatment. Even if some would, the rest of us should prevent them from doing so, just as today we properly do not allow people to consent to being enslaved by others or to be killed for their pleasure.

Neither Clonaid nor the Raelians are likely to be leaders in these areas of scientific research. It is already clear that both have some ethical homework to do.