Welcome to the 21st century: Rights for clones

By Gwynne Dyer

In the final phase of the Clone War (March-July 2045), the Arnold Schwartzenegger clones of the Pan-American Hegemony won every battle until the Russo-Turkish alliance, and in a desperate last-minute deal with the Chinese, acquired several million Bruce Lee clones and stopped the offensive just short of New Prague. Almost five million Marilyn Monroes were cloned in the first year of peace to pacify the demobilized fighters.

-- Encyclopedia Galactica, 14th ed., 2214

LONDON (JP): Sheep, as farm boys know, are not all that different from human beings. And in Scotland these days, scientists of the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, have introduced the world to its first cloned sheep, Dolly. She is less than a month old, but is absolutely identical -- a perfect twin -- to another sheep who is six years old. Which means nothing to Dolly, but triggers fantasies of power and immortality in human beings.

The team at the Roslin Institute have gone far beyond "test- tube babies" and the like. Those were the nursery slopes of bioengineering; this is the real thing.

The Scottish scientists took a cell from an adult ewe (who wishes to remain anonymous, but let us call her Gloria). It was an ordinary body cell, which means that it contained Gloria's entire genetic heritage, as all such cells do.

They inserted the DNA (genetic codes) from Gloria's cell into an unfertilized egg from another sheep (Samantha), having removed the other sheep's genetic material first. Then they implanted the treated cell in a surrogate mother (Deirdre, but her friends call her Dee-Dee).

The result was Dolly, who contains not a trace of DNA from either the surrogate mother or the sheep who produced the egg. The rest of us, human and ovine, vary from our parents and each other because sexual reproduction (even in test tubes) re-mixes the genetic material in each generation. But Dolly is an exact replica of the sheep from whom the scientists took just one cell -- a sheep that happened to be female, but could just as well have been male.

No cause for panic, according to Dr. Ian Wilmut, who led the team at the Roslin Institute that did the deed. "The idea of cloning humans is just fanciful," he told the press. "All of us would find it completely unacceptable to work on human embryos. It's important that inappropriate use of this technology is prohibited." In other words, it's quite possible to do this with human beings too, but we'd rather you didn't.

And there are those who'd rather we didn't do it to animals either. "I don't have any objections to genetic modification," said Dr. Donald Bruce, a research scientist who chairs a committee on science, religion and technology for the Church of Scotland. "But to turn them out like a production line of widgets seems to lose something of the individual dignity of the animal, to lose respect for it."

With all due respect to Donald Bruce, the way animals now live in intensive farming conditions, let alone the existence of slaughter-houses, suggests that we chose our position on the "individual dignity of animals" a long time ago. The uproar is not really about them; it's about us.

It would not be simple or cheap to clone human beings, we take 20 years to mature. Even if you could accelerate the growth process, what you would get, after many years of investment, would be a precise genetic copy of the original person, but with different experiences (or none at all). We'll probably pass laws against cloning people anyway, so why worry?

Because the ultra-rich who now pay to be deep-frozen after death, waiting to be reawakened in an era that can cure both the illness that killed them and the damage done by freezing, will also pay to live on through clones of themselves. Because, as we are forever being told, "human capital" is the most important resource of all. Because what can be done, will be done.

The idea of servile clones tailored to the job goes all the way back to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, but that was part of the early 20th century's fear that the Marxists and their fellow totalitarians owned the future. We live in a more complicated world now where the possibilities are not restricted to a diminishing few. On the contrary, they are immense, and immensely frightening.

Remember the film Blade Runner? The escaped "androids" whom the private-eye hero had to capture or kill in a 21st-century Los Angeles were not clockwork machines. They were basically clones who had been bred for mining work on another planet. They had no human rights and were not allowed to live on earth, so he was hired to hunt them down. Instead he saved one of them and fled with her, even though he knew that "androids" were always set to have short lifespans.

There will never be a future exactly like Blade Runner, but even back in 1982 the film worked well because we sensed that its moral dilemmas could eventually come into being. We're not there yet, but we have just passed another milestone.

About a decade ago, the core ideological and political struggles inside democratic societies (or the more prosperous ones, at least) started to shift away from the 20th century's obsession with the redistribution of income. Increasingly, great moral battles are being fought over who has a right to full human rights.

Some insist that newly conceived embryos do, and seek to ban abortion. Some fear that the very old will lose their human rights, and campaign against voluntary euthanasia. Not much farther down the road are rights for animals, and rights for artificial intelligence -- and, of course, rights for clones.

Welcome to the 21st century. Oh, and the name of the Philip K. Dick short story on which Blade Runner was based? It was called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.