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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Almost everywhere outside of the United States, it will of course be illegal to clone humans. The U.S. is the only country in the world that has the technological ability to do unlimited reprogenetics -- and no national regulatory structure at all. This seems to be a paradoxical result of the strength of the religious right, which in the U.S. is too powerful to need to compromise with the scientific establishment, or to find out what is actually going on with the embryo research it finds so repulsive. This has unfortunate effects: The American scientific community seems to have decided that if God has nothing to say to it, it might as well listen to Mammon. Silver makes it very clear that there are no medical grounds to assert that a distinct human life begins at conception, or even that every child must have two identifiable parents. Early embryos can be divided and merged almost arbitrarily in the laboratory, and this happens in nature, too. He offers a thought experiment to prove the point: Scientists could fertilize the sperm and eggs of 10 different couples, he says, and when the resulting embryos have divided three times, and have eight cells each, they could be broken into their constituent cells and then recombined differently, so that you had 10 new embryos, each made of eight cells from eight different couples. All could develop into physically normal human beings -- even though you could never say of any of them who was the father or mother. But it is hard to avoid the uneasy feeling that any children born of such an experiment would be different from the usual run of crazy mixed-up kids. This unease can be felt by anyone, religious or not, who believes that human life has some intrinsic value, whenever it may be said to start. It is not ridiculous to legislate on the basis of such unease, even if the resulting laws are ineffective. The British law against human cloning, for example, forbids the introduction of nuclear material into an embryo -- which is elsewhere defined in the legislation as a fertilized egg. But the law was drafted in the late 1980s, and the techniques developed since then by Willadsen and Wilmut, which would presumably form the basis for any human cloning, use unfertilized eggs, which are not embryos under the meaning of the act. So it might be legal to clone humans in Britain on the basis of scientific advances made since the law was passed, though it was clearly the intention of Parliament that this should not be possible. But all this leaves aside the question of why anyone should want to be cloned. It is this question that Silver's book answers best, partly intentionally and partly by being such a very accurate mirror of the social and ethical assumptions that make cloning seem so fascinating and desirable -- chief among them the belief that Americans have the God-given right to buy anything they can afford. He quotes a poll suggesting that 5 million Americans would clone themselves if given the chance. As a practical example of people who could benefit from cloning, he suggests a couple whose children are killed after they have become sterile, though there are less dramatic possibilities: "What about another couple whose situation is not so extreme, who become sterile after having one healthy child and then want to have a second by cloning the first? The second child, of course, would be a late-born identical twin. Would this be unacceptable because the older twin is not in a position to consent to being cloned? I think not." Silver argues that if we were consistently condemning that sort of cloning, we should also force the mothers of identical twins to abort one of them. But the case is hugely different: The mothers of identical twins did not plan to have them, and certainly could not ask if the twins themselves wanted to be born on those terms. It turns out that very little research has been done on the social and psychological consequences of being an identical twin, though their genetics have been closely examined. And it is very strange for anyone working in reproductive medicine to argue that whatever occurs in nature must be good, or, at worst, harmless. The largest practical use of our knowledge of genetics at the moment is to identify naturally occurring conditions for which the best treatment known to science is therapeutic abortion. I am not of course suggesting that that is how identical twins should be treated: Merely pointing out that the fact that cloning occurs in nature is no argument for its desirability. But the real meat in Silver's book, and the part that will no doubt impress itself on the popular imagination, lies in his belief that the genetic engineering of embryos will become safe and even commonplace among the rich in the next 50 years. This is not cloning. It relies on the faith that the human genome can be not merely sequenced but thoroughly understood, so that one could study a person's DNA and understand the character that should result from it. This finds its logical conclusion in the fantasies of completely re-engineered humans mentioned earlier, with their glowing bottoms and built-in FM radios. But long before we reach that stage, Silver is confident that humans will be able to select among their own genes those that give desirable characters. This is deeply controversial, though he mentions these controversies on only one page out of 250. The problem with genetic engineering in complicated beasts like humans is two-fold. One gene can affect many different areas of development; at the same time, what seem to us simple factors, like height, are affected by the interactions of many genes. When it comes to complicated and worthwhile faculties, like intelligence, the number of genes involved, their relative importance and their detailed interactions are all a complete mystery. Dr. Tom Wilkie -- the head of biomedical ethics for the Wellcome Trust in London and author of "Perilous Knowledge," another excellent guide to this subject -- says, "There is still a major gap in science as well as in logic between being able to clone someone and the basic problem of what genes do you stitch in to ensure better health. You don't have to do cloning to do that. But the determinants of health are subtle and certainly polygenic to a very large degree." It may be that this problem will be solved, and the kind of deep understanding of genetic technology that Silver anticipates will appear. And, if that happens, it may turn out to be the case that only 100 or so genes determine intelligence, that only 10 of those really matter, and that these 10 can safely be modified to produce more intelligent children. But those are possibilities, not certainties. What is certain, however, is that people will bet on them. Never mind
the science. The final promise of Silver's book is that the rich will soon
be very different from you and me: They will have become a different
species biologically.
Andrew Brown is writing "The Darwin Wars: How Genes Became Gods," which Simon and Schuster will publish next spring. His last piece for Salon 21st was The Meme Hunter. Come have your say on cloning in Table Talk's Science and Health discussion area. |
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