Cloning: How Do We Morally Navigate the Uncharted Future?

Saturday, Feb. 22, 1997, may be a day that will live in infamy. In terms of its ultimate importance for humanity, the announcement that a team of scientists in Scotland has successfully cloned a sheep has only one rival in our century and perhaps in all of history: the development of the atomic bomb. In that sense, Dr. Ian Wilmut’s lab was the Alamogordo of biology. In the New Mexico desert on July 18, 1945, the progression of scientific exploration crossed a barrier of theory into the realm of actuality--and into a landscape that we can hardly imagine.

The Hiroshima--a successful application of the new science to human life--is yet to come, but there no longer can be any serious doubt that the cloning of a human being is on the horizon. Just as Alamogordo in 1945 marked the first time in human existence that we became capable of ending all life on our planet, Edinburgh in 1997 marks the first time that we confronted the prospect of propagating our species outside the biological laws of sexual reproduction.

Throughout history, people (especially men, it seems) have dreamed of reproducing on their own. In his play “Hippolytus” (428 BC), Euripides has his protagonist exclaim: “If only we could have children without the help of women!” It was not a new lament. As early as the second millennium BC, in a Mesopotamian myth a god named Enki attempts to create a being on his own. He releases semen, but does not place it in a woman. The result is a horribly deformed and helpless creature. Enki realizes that the woman is still needed, but he is tantalized by how close he came to achieving male-only creation. In Greek mythology, Zeus swallows his wife and gives birth from his head to a full-grown Athena.

More than two thousand years later, Mary Shelley wrote of Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s aspiration to create a new life by himself. He is striving to fulfill the desire that drove Enki, but like Enki, he achieves a monster.

In “The Eumenides” (458 BC), Aeschylus asserted male-only procreative power by placing these words in the mouth of Apollo: “The mother is no parent of that which is called her child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed that grows. The parent is he who mounts. A stranger, she preserves a stranger’s seed.”

That metaphor of the sperm being planted in the woman as a seed is planted in soil is among the most consequential mistakes in human history. It allowed men to see themselves as the sole possessors of procreative power and reduced women to the status of containers for the putative creations of men. This misconception about conception has been at the root of countless problems for thousands of years. Even though we know it to be erroneous, it continues to affect our views of men and women.

Now we seem to be at the dawn of an era in which something like this can become reality, except that as technology now stands, it would be possible for women to have children without the help of men rather than the other way around. Artificial wombs, however, could combine with cloning to make the dream of Hippolytus come true.

Sexual reproduction, a process in force for more than a billion years, requires each individual, male or female, to “dilute” his or her genes with those of another in order to pass them along. It is well established that this constant remixing of genes gained us a substantial evolutionary advantage. But the price of this process of sexual reproduction may be an inborn sense of incompleteness that in turn produces sexual desire as an unconscious means of trying to regain the wholeness that sexual differentiation took away. What we (and all other creatures that reproduce sexually) are unknowingly striving toward is a primal unity that is neither male nor female.

Now, however, the “culturing” of new humans by removing the DNA from an egg and replacing it with that of a single adult points toward a new culture of narcissism. If we think single-parent families are a problem now, imagine what may be in the offing.

We Americans pride ourselves on being a nation of self-made men, but do we really want to live in a world of literal bastards?