Could You Live in the Brave New World?

There is nothing really threatening to you and me about a clone. Twins are clones. A cloned person is no more a danger to anybody than any other person. If we take a look at the science and look at what is going on, every animal study out there says this is going to be very tough to create a human clone. You have to be loony to try to do it in people right now. We cannot make it work in animals. Until you hear somebody safely clone a primate, it may not be doable in people.

There are mainly three reasons I can think of beyond safety why cloning might be problematic. One is that it might be strange to be made in the image or appearance of somebody else who lived before you. If you were cloned Dolly-style you would know much about how you might look, much about your appearance and presentation to the world. That probably could be something of a burden. You would have people always looking at you and saying, “Gee you remind me of your mom.” People now already go through this without being actually genetically identical. It could be psychological or emotionally tough. Second, you could also get into some strange emotional relationships. If I were to clone a partner, I would be looking at someone eventually if they grew up, presuming they were healthy and it worked, who looked exactly like my partner except the clone would be twenty-five or thirty years younger! They would actually have the same genes as my partner. I could even have relations with this person, and not technically be committing incest (the "yuck factor"). You can find yourself waking up to people at home, relating to people in ways that would be deemed emotionally inappropriate or psychologically difficult. You could find yourself sort of falling in love or having inappropriate feelings toward people just by their appearance.

There is another kind of psychological or social issue that might be difficult. Genes are not destiny, they are sometimes destiny. Some diseases and conditions are controlled by our genes or heavily determined by them. You would know some things about your future. You would know what happened to your parents and certain health facts about them. You might know that you are going to get early onset breast cancer, or have a strong disposition to Type II Diabetes, or that you are going to go bald at thirty. Many other traits are under genetic control, not destiny. Some things are very tightly controlled by genes. It might be disturbing to have that information and have to live with it. You can ask people today if they want to get a test for Alzheimer's disease or Huntington's disease. If there is no cure, how many people could live with that?