Human Cloning: Strange Bedfellows

* Re “Fringe Cloning Venture Raises Troubling Issues,” April 22: Panayiotis Zavos’ attempt to justify his intention to clone a human being by saying he is committed to helping people who have “no other option” to exercise their “right to reproduce” is absurd. Infertility is the inability to initiate, sustain or support reproduction and results from a physical, emotional or psychological deficiency or imbalance. Sometimes the deficiency can be corrected, sometimes not. To say that someone has a right to reproduce even if he or she cannot become fertile is like saying that a blind person has a right to see.

Cloning is an attempt to bypass the fertility issue altogether by avoiding reproduction through the union of the opposite sexes and would not give a couple a “child from our blood,” as the U.S. naval officer quoted in the article said he and his wife want. It would result in the progeny of only one of them.

Speaker and author Joseph Chilton Pearce has observed that there is a difference between intelligence and intellect. Intelligence will act only for the welfare of the whole (organism, species or planet). On the other hand, intellect, which is unique to humans, is split off from the whole and does whatever it is capable of doing--and wants to do--regardless of the impact on the whole. It seems to me that Zavos is demonstrating the latter.

JOHN D. LELAND

Pasadena

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We are on the threshold of the most momentous event in the history of mankind--the cloning of a human being. Once that threshold is crossed, there is no turning back. It is within the realm of possibility that within the next several hundred years the human inhabitants of this planet will consist entirely of clones. O brave new world!

T.C. CHASE JR.

San Luis Obispo