Cloning and the abolition of man

13 August 2004

Much of the world understands that human cloning has huge implications for human dignity. But Tony Blair - with little public debate - is permitting one of the world's most liberal regimes for human cloning. Legalising research cloning will inevitably lead to very unsafe live-birth cloning.

The Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority*'s recent go-ahead for scientists in Newcastle to begin Britain’s first cloning experiments was a momentous step.

Reproductive (or live-birth) cloning is opposed by nearly the whole world but a few nations – including Britain, China and Korea – are pioneering therapeutic (or medical research) cloning. Other nations – Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the United States – are extremely cautious about all forms of cloning and the United Nations may yet vote for a worldwide ban. Such a ban would seriously curtail the interest of scientists in cloning research.

Therapeutic cloning is wrong because it inevitably necessitates the destruction of embryonic human life. Although research cloning could one day yield major medical advances the Nuremberg Code* forbade experimentation on a human being if injury or death might result.

Adult stem cell research is one alternative route to finding a cure to major illnesses – a route that does not cannibalise human life in the process.

Nazi Germany carried out a variety of experiments on Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Poles and people it labelled “feebleminded”. Some were exposed to declining temperatures in order to determine how cold it could get before they died. These experiments helped Hitler’s regime to understand the risks that its parachutists faced from landing in freezing waters.

After WWII, doctors and scientists were united in their view that no human being should be the subject of an experiment that could harm or kill him.

The post-Nazi medical ethics enshrined in the so-called Nuremburg Code would be violated by cloning and, perhaps, that is one of the reasons why modern-day Germany has led the world in banning it.

In research cloning the nucleus of a female oocyte – or ‘egg’- is removed and replaced with a nucleus from another cell. The human embryo from which stem cells are harvested for this replacement is destroyed. Pro-cloning scientists argue that the embryo is such an ill-developed form of human life that it doesn’t deserve special protection. But the human embryo is a genetically complete human being and given oxygen, food, water and a facilitating environment it will become a person like the rest of us. Once we start deciding that certain human beings are valuable and others can be discarded we will slip further down the slope to a world that kills severely disabled infants and very sick old people on the basis of their perceived usefulness and cost of care. We will soon have the technology to eliminate unborn children who don’t meet the specifications demanded by their parents or by society. Is that sort of world very different from Nazi eugenic policy and its goal of a pure-bred Aryan gene pool?

The pharmaceutical industry has begun to successfully frame the debate as ‘treatment for terrible diseases’ versus ‘a ban on cloning’. This is dishonest. Opponents of research cloning point to the successes* of uncontroversial adult stem cell research as providing alternative sources of hope for people suffering from Alzheimers and other debilitating conditions. A fairer way of framing of the debate might see the benefits, expense and ethics of adult stem research posed against embryonic stem cell research. Another way of thinking would be to consider the 'opportunity cost' of expensive cloning research. Would more lives be enriched by investing in cleaner water for the third world or warmer housing for children growing up in the inner city?

In many ways reproductive cloning is less objectionable than research cloning. An embryo cloned for reproduction is given the chance of life that an embryo created for research will not have. In any case, Britain’s simultaneous go-ahead for research cloning and prohibition of reproductive cloning may be impossible to manage. That is certainly the US Department of Justice’s official view. Once cloning for research purposes has taken place only the most draconian forms of laboratory policing could attempt to stop cloned embryos from being implanted. The subsequent birth of a cloned baby would then be impossible to detect.

If human cloning followed the pattern of animal cloning we could be creating terrible suffering. Dolly the cloned sheep died prematurely* after suffering from arthritis. Other cloned animals have suffered from serious abnormalities. Spontaneous abortion is another common problem. Dr Leon Kass of the US Commission on Bioethics* has stated: “Nearly all scientists agree that attempts to clone a human being carry grave risks of producing unhealthy and disabled children”.

More than fifty years ago - in ‘The Abolition of Man’ - C S Lewis warned:

“If any one age really attains by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make is descendants what it pleases, all men who live after are the patients of that power”.

Cloning is but one of a number of emerging technologies that will potentially give us enormous power to determine the character of generations of human beings that follow us. We already have powers to select the sex of our babies and these powers are being consistently used to choose boys over girls. In future we may have powers to terminate a developing foetus that lacks the genetic qualities that a parent - or the society – desires. How many parents will be brave enough to conceive a child naturally if most are engineering clever, athletic and beautiful offspring? Safe – well, safe-ish - mood-improving, performance-enhancing, memory-erasing and life-extending drugs may all become available.

The Midas Touch problem

The greatest danger of the biotech revolution is not so much that there will be the kind of meltdown described in fiction – Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake* (Bloomsbury, 2003) being a prominent example of the genre – but that we’ll actually get what we wish for. Everything King Midas touched became gold. What would be the side-effects of the biotech industry achieving Midas-style effectiveness? The risks of ‘the Midas problem’ are fully explored in 'Beyond Therapy'* and reviewed by Gregg Easterbrook of The New Republic*. People start living for a hundred and eighty years but - like worms and mice whose lifespans have doubled – infertility might become a major problem. People also might stop wanting children. Schools would close; society would lose its spark. What if memory-erasing drugs become widely available? 1945’s Holocaust camp survivors might understandably have consumed mind-erasing drugs if they had been available. They would have slept more soundly but would society have come to forget the lessons of the Holocaust era?

Conception can occur asexually through cloning. New technologies give adults more and more opportunities to ‘create’ children and raise them outside of conventional family units. Should society welcome this? Are lawmakers going to ignore the overwhelming evidence that suggests children grow up most successfully within a loving and stable home provided by a mother and father?

Links for further research

EXTERNAL LINK: Comment on Reproductive Ethics

EXTERNAL LINK: The US-based Center for Bioethics and Culture

EXTERNAL LINK: Australasian Bioethics