A Matter of Choice
By DAVID ROSS Although this is a column about cloning, hopefully it won't be a column like every other column I've written about cloning. If you've ever seen Star Wars, Attack of the Clones, you've probably gotten a good indication of the rational level that society greets this possible scientific advance. In the movie, row upon row of genetically enhanced soldiers march to sink Mankind into an abyss of war. Yes, cloning, the replication of a being in its entirety using genetic material, has gotten a bad rap. This week some insane religious cult claimed to have cloned a baby that they are calling "Eve," thus prompting the media and political hacks into a feeding frenzy. To them the very act of cloning is, by itself, a crime. Much of the fundamentalist religious community, right on so many issues of ethics and morality, has, unfortunately, through the ages consistently been on the wrong side of scientific advancement. The same people who tried Galileo for saying that the Earth revolved around the Sun; whose intellectual descendants prosecuted the teaching of evolution, who opposed space travel as invading God's realm and who called artificial hearts, test tube babies and bioengineering works of the devil, are lining up to denounce cloning. So are the politicians, most of whom aren't motivated by ethics or anything close to it. They oppose cloning because it represents a force that they can't control, so they fear it. Many of these same people have no problem with mothers having a "right to choose" to kill an unborn child. Why then do they quail at someone choosing to reproduce their own genetic material, a process that, in contrast, creates life? They're my Doritos, aren't they? Why can't I make more? Don't I have a right to choose? President Bush, who's a good guy to have around if you have a national terrorism crisis, is not the wisest head to consult about issues of science. One senses that, being a cattle rancher, he understands artificial insemination, but that's probably about as far as we can assume he has taken his biological education, with the possible exception of accidental TV exposure to Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bush's gut reaction is to ban cloning. Cloning of organs such as the heart or kidney to save lives? Ban it! Cloning people? Ban it! The very idea of cloning, genetic engineering and better living through gene-splicing sends the Luddite crowd into hysteria. Genetic engineering, which is nothing more than breeding humans so that disease and birth defects are eliminated and intelligence and ability are enhanced, is called evil because Hitler advocated it. Hitler also was a strict vegetarian and rabidly anti-tobacco. Does that make C. Edward Koop and Paul McCartney Nazis? Why does improving the human race so that people don't die from childhood diseases, so that more people are intelligent and strong and live longer qualify as a crime? God created human genius. The crime is not in using it, but in neglecting it. |
