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Do people really need copies of themselves?
By Carl Heintze
Now that the possibility presents itself, I'm not so sure I want to be cloned. You say you don't know about cloning?
Surely you've read the headlines: a laboratory has announced it's cloned some human cells, not a whole human, of course, about half a dozen cells or so, but, you know, one thing in science leads to another. Cloning is coming and if you listen to some legislators it's right around the corner. They are, to say the least, exercised about it. So are religious leaders.
If God had wanted us to clone ourselves, he would have made it happen a lot sooner than it apparently has. Or we're not having any of those clones around here. You just can't tell what they might do. There might even be cloned terrorists.
There are at least cloned sheep and maybe even a cloned cow or two. The clones, however, have not been without difficulties. Some scientists say, as they said about Dollie, the famous cloned sheep, that cloning is at best a haphazard process. There are a lot more failures than there are successes. And there also are a lot of unanswered questions.
But it still looks like cloning is coming.
Whether it is coming in your lifetime or, more acutely, in mine, no one seems prepared to say with certainty. But for the moment I'm taking the far out approach. I'm assuming that cloning is possible and that if I live long enough--something by no means certain--there will be another me around, perhaps even writing a cloned column like this.
It could happen.
I view that with some trepidation. Oh, I know there are advantages. If I were cloned there would be a spare me around, sort of like having a second car. If anything went wrong with the first me, then they (presum-
ably the biologists who have figured out how to clone people) would be able to take the damaged or missing part and attach it to the old me. Or even clone a part. Don't ask me how. That's not my area of expertise. As I say, I am just taking them at their word.
Or if things really got bad, they could just do away with the original me and substitute the second me, nice and new and ready for use, sort of like taking it out of the box, winding it up and setting it in motion.
Of course, there might be some difficulties with this plan. I gather that the cells of a clone age at the same rate as the creature from which the clone was made. You can't go backward in time. So presumably the clone would not have any longer to live than did the original me. Not much advantage there.
I also am unsure as to whether the clone would have the same memories as the original. That is to say, the new clone might be intact and look like me, but it wouldn't remember anything the original me knew. Like how to tie one's shoes, for example. Being reconstituted would be a little like having a stroke. One would have to start all over at Ground Zero. (We tend to measure everything these days by Ground Zero, right?)
So clones would be functional--barely--but they also would have a lot of learning to do to catch up with the person from whom they were cloned. Are you still with me?
As you can see there are a lot of ramifications from cloning. One of the least weighty is whether or not we need one or more copies of ourselves around. Who, for instance, would want a second Hitler? It would be nice, however, to have a spare Einstein hanging about, ready to take over when the first one became inoperative.
And then there is the question of whether or not you could order a slightly different clone model from the original. I'd certainly like that. I'd like my clone to be more trim (well, all right, less fat, if you want to be brutally frank about it) and I'd like him to have blond hair. I've had dark hair for one lifetime. It's time for a change.
And as long as we're improving on the old model, I have a couple of other changes to suggest: a nose that's not quite so flat, eyes that don't need glasses at age 14 and a stronger chin. Actually, I can think of a few other suggestions, but ... you get the idea.
Cloning humans is a lot different than cloning sheep or cows. Neither cows nor sheep ever express any dissatisfaction with what they are. Presumably Dollie, the sheep, doesn't care if she looks like all the other sheep in the pasture (and she does), and she doesn't have any real relearning to do. She's just, well, another sheep.
So cloning may not be all that wonderful after all. We aren't really looking for a nation of sheep, but rather a unity of diverse people. It's the differences that make us human, not the identical shapes, faces and ideas. So even though it is tempting, I guess I'm really not interested in getting cloned after all.
A collection of Carl Heintze's essays can be found at http://www.doitright.com/Carl/essays. He can be reached at feodorh@juno.com.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
