In Praise of the Gene That Heals the Heart
Dr. Seed is a dangerous man.
That’s the consensus, anyway. Scientists, clerics, physicians, politicians--all express grave qualms, even horror, concerning the claims of Richard Seed, the Harvard- educated physicist who says he has assembled a team of researchers to embark on the cloning of human beings.
They accuse him of playing God and talk about nightmare scenarios: a mass-produced “master race,” organ-donor factories, perverse bids at immortality. Certainly experimentation seems inevitable, and certainly it’s creepy.
But not everybody is afraid of Dr. Seed. Some people are quite willing to think the unthinkable, as I was reminded by a Palmdale man named Perry Casapao.
Consider, then, his dissenting opinion.
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“Macabre, unethical, immoral. . . Do you think so? I don’t. I have pondered human cloning since that night in June 1995 when my dear, dear daughter was taken away from me in a senseless accident.”
There is no grief, it is said, like the grief of losing a child.
“I have her DNA,” Casapao’s e-mail continued. “Among her belongings, the coroner’s office gave me a cellophane bag with her religious medallion (estampita) inside. The medallion is encrusted with what I presume is her blood. How much should it cost? After the initial trials, a couple hundred thousand dollars might do it. If I hock myself to the devil, I might be able to swing it.”
Anna Maria Casapao was a 16-year-old sophomore-to-be at Highland High School when she climbed into a car with a group of friends on the night of June 3, 1995. The driver swerved around a railroad crossing and failed in his attempt to race past an eastbound train. He died along with Anna and two other friends. A fifth was injured.
Casapao’s contrarian thoughts echo those of my close friend Wes, who lost two children many years apart. Wes, who is 68, was a young man when 3-year-old Julie drowned in a swimming pool. Only five years ago, his son from his second marriage committed suicide. Adam was 18.
A few months ago, Wes shared an unpublished essay with me:
“Whose ethics are they anyway?
“It seems that everyone from the president on down is talking about the issue of human cloning as if it were a crime against God, but I don’t know of anyone who’s heard it from Him.
“I remember as a teenager being tremendously moved by a terrible accident somewhere in the Midwest--Iowa, I believe--in which a train struck a school bus and wiped out all eight children in a single family. I couldn’t imagine a worse disaster. And I remember being happy for the parents a year or so later when I read that they had a new baby.
“To my eyes, it was fortunate that they were able to have another child. But if they hadn’t, would cloning have been such a terrible thing? Would the infant be any less human? Any less their child?”
Toward the end of his essay, Wes wrote: “Show me the 11th Commandment, carved in stone, that says: ‘Thou shalt not clone.’ ” In his message, Perry wrote: “The commandment is supposed to be ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill,’ not ‘Thou shall not create.’ ”
They recognize the familiar moral pitfalls. They simply argue that there may be circumstances in which cloning would not merely be acceptable, but a source of great joy.
Playing God? Man has played God, Perry suggests, since he first applied an herb to a wound. Now we build artificial hearts, transplant organ systems, go gaga over septuplets conceived with the help of fertility drugs.
While most people shudder, Perry imagines a different world.
Suppose somebody causes an accident that leaves a child dead and leaves the mother unable to bear children. Suppose the grieving parents want to have another child. Would it be wrong for them to seek to have the person who caused their grief pay for the cloning?
If that sounds bizarre, compare it to what Americans do now in courts across the land, day after day. We routinely attach dollar signs to pain and suffering. We sue for wrongful death and put price tags on human life.
So what’s more moral: Blood money? Or the creation of new life?
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Anna’s clone wouldn’t be named Anna, Casapao says, because Anna was one of a kind. She was the baby of the family, the youngest of four siblings. Her father says she was a joyful, popular girl who loved to write poetry. She read “Gone With the Wind” from cover to cover in the fourth grade and her mother cherishes the music box Anna gave her that plays “Tara’s ?Theme.”
“She was really something,” he said.
So Perry says that, if cloning were feasible, the only thing that would stop him is the fact that he and his wife are 55 now. Would it be fair for a teenager to have parents in their 70s?
Perhaps the only people who can fully comprehend this kind of grief are other parents who grieve as well.
“I still visit Julie’s grave,” Wes wrote. “I talk to her and remember how bright she was. . . .
“Light began to creep under the shroud over my life after I remarried. Eleven years after Julie’s death, Adam was born. What a miracle! He was the answer to an impossible dream. I hadn’t dared hope to have another child. He also was beautiful and bright, but his life was troubled from the beginning. . . .”
People talk and talk about how unfair it would be to the cloned child, how traumatizing, how difficult. But Wes knows too well that a child conceived the old-fashioned way may descend into the depths of despair despite a father’s love.
Yes, life is unfair. Wes and Perry both know that. And they would add something else: Life is unfair no matter how it’s created.
But it is still life.
Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.
