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 won't 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.