Human cloning will come at a very high social cost.
DNA and death of love
By Jose A. Bufill
She's almost five and there's no doubt about it: Dolly, the first clone of the DNA of an adult mammal, is no one-hit
wonder.
But she may have brought in a new age - one that endangers human love itself. For to justify human cloning, we can
assume only that human beings are nothing special, no different from any other animal. Depressing but true. We may be
about to witness the Dollification of human reproduction - and the death of love.
The nuclear transfer technology that brought her to us, first reported by Dolly's Scottish progenitors in 1996, has been
successfully reproduced in other animal species by researchers around the world.
Now the British parliament has approved legislation allowing the same techniques to be used with human genetic
material. It is now legal for British scientists to extract a full complement of human DNA from any adult cell and inject it
into an egg from which the normal female complement of DNA has been removed. Under carefully controlled
conditions, the fertilized egg would be coaxed to grow as a human embryo, multiplying for up to 14 days, just enough
time to ripen its stem cells. The embryo would then be drawn and quartered, and its stem cells manipulated further to
correct the pathologies of its single parent. The expectation of significant economic benefit has already prompted the
British government to invest heavily in the technology.
The British decision is certainly unprecedented but hardly unexpected. For years, researchers from a broad range of
academic disciplines have been busy attempting to blur the clear distinction between humans and animals. Some
lawyers now designate zoo, farm and laboratory animals, not to mention family pets, as beneficiaries of legal rights.
Biologists have offered new evidence that parrots and dolphins have stunning cognitive and communicative abilities akin
to ours. Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson claims that human reason, like animal intelligence, results from
complex brain circuitry, and that human freedom doesn't exist at all: "We are just an exposed negative waiting to be
dipped into developer fluid."
The message is that humans are really no different from animals, just more developed.
And so, the ideals and passions, the creativity and purposefulness that seem to confer an extraordinary character on our
existence are written off as evolved traits molded by the mix of our genetic blueprint and the jumbled environmental
"dip" in which we grow. There is no longer reason to believe that each and every human person plays a singular and
unrepeatable role in the world. Anyone (and therefore everyone) is expendable and may be copied.
The real casualty here is not only the special status we humans may hold as free and rational beings, but moreover, that
distinctive ability that most clearly separates us from other animals: our capacity to love.
After all, to be an animal is easy. It comes naturally. Being truly human, on the other hand, is quite difficult. In a certain
sense, it requires doing violence to our animal nature and beginning a process of transformation. Becoming human is a
process strengthened or weakened by deliberate personal choices, not random forces of nature. Love helps us
overcome our animal nature because it helps us to seek the good of another before our own good.
"Survival of the fittest" has no place in the realm of love. Acts of genuine self-donation humanize and liberate. Acts of
self-indulgence enslave and corrupt our capacity to love. We can become authentically human only by learning to love:
discovering it, experiencing it and putting it into effect. It is the only means we have to draw out from our animality the
traits that define our humanity. Human love points us toward a higher - that is, a human - standard of life.
On the surface, the cloning of adult human DNA seems filled with the promise of life and health. But implicit in the
language of cloning is a destructive logic that contradicts any possibility of authentically human love, the paradigm of
which is the fruitful love of spouses for one another and for their child. We cannot know what kind of organism will
result from the human nuclear-transfer experiments now legalized in Britain, but one thing is certain. Cloning is the
recreation of a human being in isolation. Arguably, the progenitor of the clone engages in the ultimate form of
self-indulgence: a radical affirmation of personal autonomy and the obstinate denial of the value of our inherent
dependency and need for others.
Unlike the words in Tina Turner's song, love is not "just a secondhand emotion." Love is absolutely necessary, in our
beginning and at each moment of our existence, and it is the arduous, elusive goal to which we must aspire if we are to
be worthy of the name "human."
But when it comes to human cloning what, indeed, does love got to do with it? Nothing. And that is the angst we should
feel in the Age of Dolly. |
