The most compelling case for reproductive cloning is often made by infertile people or those who have lost a child. In the early days of 2001, a US congressional hearing on human reproductive cloning heard from two grieving parents. One man’s words were read aloud by a scientist working with couples interested in cloning. The man’s 11-month-old son had died after heart surgery, and in a letter to the committee the man wrote that he “hoped and prayed that my son would be the first; I could do no less for him. He deserves a chance to live … I would never stop until I could give his DNA—his genetic make-up—a chance.”
The other parent was a bioethicist named Thomas H. Murray, who at that time was a member of President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Committee, which in 1997 had delivered a report on cloning. Murray, also then-president of The Hastings Center (an organization I joined two years later, in 2003), pointed out that cloning was not safe. Just four years after the birth of Dolly the sheep, it was already clear that offspring of cloned mammals had numerous medical problems. Clinical trials would therefore be unethical. Murray spoke in favor of banning reproductive cloning, with carefully crafted exceptions for laboratory uses of cloning techniques, and he criticized those who “provide false hope and possible exploitation of parents desperate in their grief over having lost a child.”
In an op-ed published shortly after the hearing, Murray shared that his 21-year-old daughter Emily had been murdered just five months earlier. While he sympathized with the other grieving father, neither Murray nor his wife would seek to clone their beloved child, even if the procedure were safe. A clone wouldn’t grow up to be the daughter they had lost—it would be a separate, new individual born and raised in a different time. Nor should any child “have to bear the oppressive expectation that he or she will live out the life denied to his or her idealized genetic avatar.” But perhaps most compellingly, Murray argued that the emotional ends of reproductive cloning were illusory. As much as he and his wife might wish to turn back time, he wrote, “cloning cannot change the fact of death nor deflect the pain of grief.”
Perhaps most compellingly, Murray argued that the emotional ends of reproductive cloning were illusory.
The antagonist of “A Healing at the Triple B Hunting Lodge,” Scott Sherman’s Future Tense Fiction story, might beg to differ. Parker Rodion, the owner of the wellness retreat whose high-paying guests seek catharsis by hunting down clones of their enemies, is not offering to return a lost child (that might require a more convincing replica than he is able to assemble). But he claims that his clones are close enough copies to deliver emotional healing to those around them—in this case, by dying instead of living. Rodion’s use of reproductive cloning promises to deflect, perhaps even erase, the pain of grief. As a bonus, the cathartic vengeance is supposedly victim-less because the clones don’t count.
“The question of their humanity is subjective,” declares Rodion. But by flipping the motivation to clone from love to hate, Sherman invites concern for the clone, much as the viewer develops concern for the robots in HBO’s Westworld series. The ultimate means to an end, Rodion’s clones are without rights, thoroughly dehumanized—a problem anticipated by legal scholar Kerry Lynn Macintosh in her 2005 book Illegal Beings: Human Clones and the Law.
Zayna Rafael, the story’s protagonist, is disturbed by the killings taking place at the Triple B Hunting Lodge. “They have blood. Bone. Memory,” she says of the clones, who are created onsite to be hunted down. Rodion concedes that the clones are organisms, but insists that they are not human beings, not persons. “This has all been litigated,” he explains. They are “therapeutic clonal re-creations.” Their deaths are of no concern.
Sherman’s story took me back to the late 1990s, a couple of years before that landmark congressional hearing, when I got my start in the field of bioethics at a time when human cloning seemed imminent. Asexual reproduction, where the offspring is genetically identical to its parent, is fairly common in plants and microbes, and is a backup option for some reptiles like the Komodo dragon. In 1958, the British scientist John Gurdon and colleagues managed to clone a frog (the word “clone” had not yet been coined; they called it a “transplant-frog”). Yet it wasn’t until 1996 that the first cloned mammal was born. Dolly, a Finn-Dorset ewe, was created using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, where the nucleus of an egg is removed and replaced with the nucleus of an adult cell to create an embryo that has all the same chromosomes as the adult cell donor. No sperm required. When her birth was announced to the world, it was compared to the atom bomb. Newspapers, TV stations, and commentators felt sure—a cloned human wasn’t far off.
Rodion’s use of reproductive cloning promises to deflect, perhaps even erase, the pain of grief.
Two years later, in 1998, pluripotent stem cells were derived from human embryos for the first time. These cells have the potential to become any cell in the body. Their successful culture in vitro suggested that a different type of cloning might be possible, where a human embryo is created that is identical genetically to a living person, but instead of transferring that embryo to a uterus for gestation, stem cells could be derived and grown in the lab. These pluripotent cells would be useful for research into diseases suffered by the cell donors and, it was hoped, could one day be manipulated to grow into specific types of cells, tissue, or even organs for transplant back into the cell donors without the risk of rejection.
Neither of these uses of cloning has yet been fully realized. As far as we know, nobody has been cloned, nor has regenerative medicine yet advanced to the point where a person’s cells can be cloned and grown into an immuno-compatible kidney. This would have surprised some of the most daring scientists of the past, who expected to see a cloned human before the turn of the last century. Indeed, something like these two types of human cloning—reproductive cloning to create a genetic copy of another person and therapeutic cloning to grow cells, tissues, and organs—have been discussed by scientists for at least a hundred years.
In a speech at the Heretics Club at Cambridge University in 1923, the British scientist J.B.S. Haldane described “a few obvious developments” in biological science that would occur in the 20th century. Among them was eugenics by way of ectogenesis, which Haldane predicted would involve removing the ovaries of specific women and repeatedly stimulating them to produce eggs in the lab. The eggs would be fertilized with selected sperm and fully gestated in the lab. The resultant offspring would be siblings, not clones, yet Haldane imagined using this kind of selective breeding to manufacture hundreds of genetically-superior sibling groups, foreshadowing the idea of clone armies (although Haldane hoped for enhanced musicality and decreased criminality, rather than superior fighting power).
Haldane’s speech, published as an essay titled “Daedalus or Science and the Future” was quite controversial at the time. It apparently inspired one of Haldane’s friends—Aldous Huxley—to write Brave New World, a haunting dystopia in which human beings are not born, but mass produced in “hatcheries” using a version of the process imagined by Haldane.
Newspapers, TV stations, and commentators felt sure—a cloned human wasn’t far off.
Haldane revisited some of these predictions in another speech, delivered in 1963, a few years after the frog cloning and the year before he died. Still optimistic about “conscious evolution” or eugenics, although only if voluntarily embraced, Haldane imagined taking cells from “persons of attested ability” to produce clones (Haldane is considered to have coined the term). Clones could be raised by their originals in environments and with expectations suited to their extraordinary abilities. Haldane acknowledged that some of these clones might disappoint their originals and also saw the potential for clones to be created in pursuit of more problematic traits, such as an inability to sense pain. But overall, he was confident that reproductive cloning would be part of a future utopia.
A few years later, in 1966, the Nobel prize-winning scientist Joshua Lederberg published an essay on experimental genetics and human evolution which claimed the benefits of reproductive cloning almost self-evident: “Leave sexual reproduction for experimental purposes,” Lederberg wrote, “when a suitable type is ascertained, take care to maintain it by clonal propagation.” Lederberg saw a therapeutic benefit as well, speculating that cloning would enable “the free exchange of organ transplants with no concern for graft rejection.” He might have imagined that this exchange would be voluntary; a more sinister version was brought to life in Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliant 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, which follows a group of teenagers whose sole purpose in life is to replenish the bodies of their originals in old age or ill health.
This type of therapy—where a human clone is grown to adulthood and then sacrificed—is not what is generally meant by the term “therapeutic cloning” (although it shares some similarities with Sherman’s “kill therapy”). Aware of public sentiment against reproductive cloning, Nobel Laureate James D. Watson argued in 1971 that it would be unconscionable for societal concerns to prevent laboratory research using cloning techniques, which he thought could advance “understanding the genetic basis for cancer” and “unravel the biochemistry of diseases like cystic fibrosis.” When the topic of cloning publicly resurfaced in the late 1990s, scientists made a similar argument for reserving space within international moratoria and anti-cloning laws so biomedical uses of cloning technology could proceed.
For some years following the birth of Dolly the sheep, countries adopted policies to prevent reproductive cloning, often but not always with an exception for so called therapeutic or lab-based research uses. At that time, cloning and stem cell research seemed among the most important issues facing elected leaders. Today, public attention has moved to other scientific possibilities, from AI in medicine to genome sequencing all newborns. Some technology traverses similar ethical terrain. Whereas cloning seeks to replicate a whole desired genome, since 2012, we have been focused on gene editing, a tool to alter the genes of living or future individuals. In this debate, too, distinctions are drawn between reproductive (or heritable) uses, which are widely if not universally decried, and therapeutic (or somatic) applications. Many of the same worries remain: that we might cause harm to another human, but also that we might create something that is less than human, or whose humanity we refuse to recognize, and that our use of the technology might separate us from ourselves.
Sherman’s Rodion character, deploying science in the service of reality TV-style revenge spectacles, certainly sees his “therapeutic clonal re-creations” as less than human—a means to an end, a quarry to be hunted. In this character, Sherman captures not only the hubris of some eugenics proponents, but the persistent invitation to dehumanize. We’re always struggling to realize equality, it seems, in science and beyond. Maybe we should talk to someone.
