| Number of | In text | In summary | Ratio |
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| Sentences | 55 | 9 | 16.363636 |
| Paragraph | 7 | 4 | 57.14286 |
Hello , Dolly DOLLY is a lamb . As the first mammal to have been successfully ' cloned ` from the cells of an adult , she is the talk of the world . But what strange talk it has been . Bill Clinton declares himself troubled , and demands a report within 90 days . France 's farm minister foresees hideous barnyard monstrosities: chickens with six legs and the like . The Vatican is aghast . Newspapers and pundits trundle out all the old fears and fantasies: armies of cloned Hitlers , Mozarts or Aldous Huxley 's proletarian slaves .Such fears are understandable . Even the godless find something repugnant in the idea that man might one day invent himself , instead of inventing his creator . But it is not enough merely to register repugnance , without examining the cause of this emotion and testing its claim against the claims of reason . To throw up one 's hands in horror simply on the ground that cloning interferes with the natural order is to exaggerate the extent to which the natural order is desirable , and to under - estimate the extent to which man has already altered it , often with advantage .
First , though , some of the more outlandish worries need to be put in perspective . Science is probably a long way from being able to clone a human being . But what if it could ? Much of this week 's alarm stems from a confusion about what a clone would be . A clone is an organism that is genetically identical to another . Human clones already exist in the form of identical twins . But as anyone who has reared or met twins knows , they are not ' identical ` at all . Environment , experience and their own choices endow them with as much individuality as anyone else .
The spectre created by Dolly is that such twins might in future be parent and child instead of siblings ; and that the younger is a twin on account of somebody 's decision , rather than because of genetic accident . That is indeed a departure from the natural order of things , and may be a disturbing one , but it hardly justifies this week 's outpouring of fear . Mozart 's twin son would not necessarily be a brilliant musician even if he wanted to be , nor Hitler 's a mass murderer . The narcissist who tried to copy himself by siring a twin would have no more control over this unusual relation than any other parent has over a normal child .
What about the prospect of eugenics , selective breeding and all that ? Many people argue that in light of man 's proven propensity to abuse powerful technologies ( one Nobel laureate drew parallels this week with the nuclear bomb ) it would be folly to put this new one into the hands of future dictators who may harbour mad dreams of master races or custom - bred slaves . But this argument is not only impractical ( a tyrant would invent the technology if he wanted it ) ; it is an argument against technology in general . The putative tyrant has no need of Dolly technology ; he could already breed athletes as if they were racing horses , or pass a law forbidding short people to have babies . It is what people do that is good or bad , not what they can do . To put it another way , the fact that it would be wrong to force contraception on people is no argument against the continued existence of contraceptives .
Ban the clones ? Does all this mean that the possibility of human cloning should be joyously embraced ? Far from it . It would be suicidal , not just dispiriting , for the species to give up sexual reproduction in favour of cloning . Sex creates new gene combinations that confer new strengths , especially resistance to disease . As a distinguished biologist , George C. Williams , put it many years ago , asexual reproduction is like xeroxing your lottery ticket ; even if you have the winning number , making many copies wo not help unless the winning number is the same every time . In the history of evolution asexual lineages of species have often appeared but few have lasted long .
This threat would not arise except in the unlikely event of a mass uptake of cloning . But there are ethical reasons why human cloning should not at present go ahead even in single cases . One is that the technology that produced Dolly is far from perfect . Even if it could be made to work in human cells , there are grounds to fear that a person produced in this way might age faster than normal , falling victim prematurely to the diseases of old age ; or might turn out not to be fertile . It would be outrageous deliberately to create a person with such defects . But it is also hard to see how would - be cloners could ever be confident of their progeny being fully healthy without trying the technique out .
This Catch - 22 may well stymie human cloning for ever . So why bother to dissent from the howl of protest that attended the advent of Dolly ? Because it is an error to reach the right decision for the wrong reason . The vague feeling that cloning is an unnecessary offence against the natural scheme may very well solidify into a backlash against many of the other efforts of biologists . That would be a pity . Mankind has interfered with and reshaped the natural order for millennia . Agriculture , the domestication of animals and hunting have destroyed or altered more species and had more impact on the earth than Dolly is ever likely to have .
The fact that new technologies feel scary or strange should not be enough to rule them out . The careful application of biotechnology to plants and animals is already bringing benefits: better understanding of many diseases , new drug treatments , better health , to name a few . In genetics , in particular , medicine is poised to enter an age in which techniques such as gene therapy or genetic screening promise to add enormously to the sum of human well - being , even if they throw up complex ethical dilemmas on the way .
The dilemmas and risks need to be evaluated . To prevent unscrupulous businessmen or sinister scientists with dubious motives from conducting unethical experiments , rational debate followed by legislation is welcome - - and necessary . But to turn away from what biology and medicine can do out of nostalgia for Eden would be folly indeed .