The Speculist

The general public is desperately misinformed on a lot of topics, but I think there are two that we really need to help straighten them out on:

1. Cloning

   It isn't magic. It isn't playing God. It isn't new.

   Nature creates human clones all the time in the form of identical twins. Reproductive cloning would be nothing more than producing a late-arriving identical twin. Not the same person. The camera doesn't steal your soul, and neither will a clone. As I said, there are social reasons why this might not be a good idea, but can we please for the love of God get the idea that there is something uncanny or "spooky" about cloning out of our heads? There isn't.

2. The Human Developmental Cycle

   Look, phylogeny may not recapitulate ontogeny, but people who believe that it does are at least on the right track. If you believe that, while forming in Mommy's tummy, you were first a tadpole and then a salamander and then a shrew and then a monkey and then, finally, Mommy's Little Angel, you're wrong. But you are right to believe that at some point you became a human being, and that prior to that point, "you" were not.

   Even the Catholics believe this. As has been pointed out in the abortion debate, Catholics must believe that the egg, prior to fertilization, is not human, or else fertile women would have to attend a funeral every month. Human beings grow out of something that may be living human tissue, but that is not in and of itself a human being. That being the case, it's just a question of where you draw the line.

The Catholics draw the line at fertilization, and that isn't just arbitrary. At fertilization, you initiate a process that will (or at least could) result in a human being. But that doesn't mean it's the only place where the line can be drawn, or even the best place. Life Extension advocate Reason draws the line thusly:

On that note, it has to be said that I object to authors describing a small clump of cells as a "human clone." In my book, a human is someone you can converse with, who can think, feel pain, and suffer the effects of Alzheimer's or heart disease. An embryo has none of those characteristics. It is a pathology in modern society that there are so many people who are willing to kill or condemn millions to suffer and die rather than allow the use of small pieces of artificially created tissue to cure disease and save lives.

I agree with Reason that a mass of undifferentiated stem cells is not a human being. It doesn't have a head or a heart or a nervous system. Those things start to kick in around week five, and take recognizable shape somewhere around week eight. According to the NY Times article, the stem cells were harvested from a four-week-old blastocyst.

If we, as a society, can define humanity as starting somewhere after the fourth week of embryonic development, we open up the possibility of tremendous medical advances. This needn't be a new front in the abortion war. Most people, even conservatives, even staunch abortion opponents, take something other than the official Catholic position anyway. Or else why would there be an attempt to put a specific ban on partial-birth abortions? Most people recognize that killing a near-to-full-term baby is different from terminating a pregnancy at three or four weeks. Otherwise, the move to ban partial-birth abortions makes no logical sense.

A few years from now, it may be possible to create an embryonic clone of myself. (Biology dictates that women are easier to clone than men, so it will be a while before I can do it.) Let's consider that embryo at four weeks. If I put it in the right environment, that blastocyst might grow into my identical twin brother. It isn't my twin brother now. It's just some growing tissue taken from my body and an egg I borrowed from somebody else. It would be an amazing little bud of life, similar to (genetically identical to) the amazing little bud of life that eventually grew into me. But we have a different developmental path for this bud. Rather than growing it into a separate human being, we're going to grow it back into me.

We aren't going to kill it; the whole idea is to produce a viable collection of ongoing cells. We will remove that part of it that makes it want to grow into a different person (satisfying Leon Kass to a certain extent, by the way) and otherwise, we will allow it to go on living indefinitely. If I am injured or get sick, part of this collection of cells will be reintroduced into the organism from which it came — that would be me — to help it recover. As I age, more of the cells might be introduced to help counteract the effects; still others might be put on a new developmental path towards being a finished "part": a heart or a set of lungs or a new pair of eyes.

Each time one of these procedures was done, this living human tissue would grow into a human being. Why would anyone insist that it has to grow into a different human being? Says who? My twin brother can't demand that he has a right to exist. I never have to create a clone in the first place. And if I do create one, I assert that I have the right (before it grows into a separate and distinct human being) to decide that it will be me, rather than him, when it grows up.