> http://www.guardian.co.uk/genes/article/0,2763,464752,00.html
> Shopping for humans
> Cloning could become a production line. Jeremy Rifkin asks if we should be
> playing God with our genes
>
> Special report: the ethics of genetics <http://www.guardian.co.uk/genes/>
> Jeremy Rifkin
> Thursday March 29, 2001
> The Guardian
> Our species stands at a great divide. Before us lies the imminent prospect
> of the cloning of a human being. With this feat, we play God with our
> evolutionary destiny, and risk ominous consequences for the future of
> civilisation. Already researchers are readying the first experiments and
> the world anxiously awaits this "second coming" - except this time the
> child will have been produced by science and in the image of a specific
> human being.
> This scares many people but, proponents argue, why not? If, for example,
> an infertile couple desires to pass on their genetic inheritance by
> producing clones of one or both partners, shouldn't they be able to
> exercise their right of choice? Moreover, we are told not to be overly
> concerned because even though the clone will have the exact same genetic
> makeup as the original, he or she will develop differently because the
> social and environmental context within which his or her life unfolds will
> not be the same as the donor.
> Some professional ethicists, on the other hand, shake their heads and
> mutter about the yuck factor - people's initial disgust at the prospect of
> cloning a human being - but when pressed, can offer few, if any,
> compelling reasons to oppose what they consider to be inevitable and even
> worthwhile, under certain circumstances. Their only misgivings appear to
> be whether or not the procedure is safe and whether the baby would be
> malformed. Right to life advocates worry, in turn, that embryos used in
> the procedure will be wasted or discarded in attempts to produce a
> successful clone. Unfortunately, the deeper issues surrounding the cloning
> of a human being have received short shrift or no attention at all.
> The cloning of a human raises fundamental questions that go to the very
> nature of what it means to be a human being. No other single event in
> human history will have had as great an effect on the future of our
> species. Here are the reasons why. To begin with, our very notion of what
> life is all about is immersed in sexuality and the biological attraction
> of male and female. Much of the history of civilisation has played out
> along sexual lines, from mating rituals to the notions of family, clan,
> tribe and nation. From time immemorial we have thought of the birth of our
> progeny as a gift bestowed by God and or a beneficent nature. The coming
> together of sperm and egg represents a moment of surrender to forces
> outside of our control. The fusing of maleness and femaleness results in a
> unique and finite new creation.
> The reason most people have an almost instinctual repulsion to cloning is
> that deep down, they sense that it signals the beginning of a new journey
> where the "gift of life" is steadily marginalised and eventually abandoned
> all together. In its place, the new progeny becomes the ultimate shopping
> experience - designed in advance, produced to specification and purchased
> in the biological marketplace.
> Cloning is, first and foremost, an act of "production", not creation.
> Using the new biotechnologies, a living being is produced with the same
> degree of engineering as we have come to expect on an assembly line. When
> we think of engineering standards, what immediately comes to mind is
> quality controls and predictable outcomes. That's exactly what cloning a
> human being is all about. For the first time in the history of our
> species, we can dictate the final genetic constitution of the offspring.
> The child is no longer a unique creation - one of a kind - but rather a
> reproduction. Human cloning opens the door wide to the dawn of a
> commercial eugenics civilisation, a brave new world where new technologies
> speed the process of "improving" our offspring, allowing us to create a
> second genesis. This time, each person can become a private god and make
> offspring in his or her own image.
> In the future - certainly by the time today's babies reach adulthood - it
> will be possible to make genetic changes in the donor cell or embryo and
> begin creating customised variations of the original. Ian Wilmut, of the
> Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, has already accomplished this feat in
> his second cloned sheep. Though less celebrated than Dolly, the birth of
> Polly is far more ominous. With Polly, Wilmut's team customised a human
> gene into a sheep cell and then cloned the sheep, making it the first
> truly "designer animal". Using the clone as a "standard model", scientists
> can now produce endless customised variations suited to the requisites of
> their clients.
> Does anyone doubt for a moment that what Wilmut accomplished with Polly
> won't be made available by the biotech industry to parents who would like
> to produce cloned designer babies? Again, proponents argue, why not? If a
> prospective parent knew they were likely to pass on a genetic
> predisposition for heart disease, or stroke, or cancer, wouldn't they feel
> obligated to spare their clone by eliminating those genes in the donor
> cell or embryo? But where does one draw the line? What if the parent knew
> he or she was likely to pass on a genetic predisposition for bipolar manic
> depression, or dyslexia, or growth hormone deficiency, or a cleft palate?
> Doesn't every parent want the best possible life for their child? In the
> future, some would argue, parental responsibility and intervention ought
> to begin at the design stage, in the donor cell or cloned embryo.
> Customised human cloning offers the spectre of a new kind of immortality.
> Each generation of a particular genotype can become the ultimate artist,
> continually customising and upgrading new genetic traits into the model
> with the goal of both perfecting and perpetuating the genotype forever. It
> would be naive to believe that there aren't lots of people who would leap
> at the opportunity. Researchers at fertility clinics say that they are
> already besieged by requests to clone.
> The real threat that human cloning represents is one that, as far as I
> know, is never talked about by scientists, ethicists, biotech
> entrepreneurs, or politicians. In a society where more and more people
> clone and eventually customise their genotype to design specifications and
> engineering standards, how are we likely to regard the child who isn't
> cloned or customised? What about the child who is born with a
> "disability"? Will the rest of society view that child with tolerance or
> come to see the child as an error in the genetic code - in short a
> defective product? Indeed, future generations might become far less
> tolerant of those who are not engineered and who deviate from the genetic
> standards and norms adhered to in the "best practices" of the
> bioindustrial marketplace. If that were to happen, we might lose the most
> precious gift of all, the human capacity to empathise with each other.
> When we empathise with another human being, it's because we feel and
> experience their vulnerability, their frailties and suffering, and their
> unique struggle to claim their humanity. But, in a world that comes to
> expect perfection in its offspring, can empathy really survive?
> Human cloning represents the ultimate Faustian bargain. In our desire to
> become the architects of our own evolution, we risk the very real
> possibility of losing our humanity.
> * Jeremy Rifkin is the author of The Biotech Century, and president of The
> Foundation on Economic Trends, Washington DC.
>

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