Nature Biotechnology, 16/98, Robert Kelly, page 798
On Human Cloning
It's time to think clearly about what we are, and what we want us to be. This life and
next life. Who is it, what is it, that we want to clone?
Since cloning is a human idea, and the only people (as far as is known) who are doing
cloning. are human people, it is interesting to me to speculate on the mind sets from
which we might turn out to be working.
I recall reading in a newspaper recently, among endless titillating speculations about
cloning humans, some geneticist quoted as saying something to this effect: Well, we
shouldn't get our hopes up too much-if we were able to clone Mozart, we might not get
another great composer-we might just get a cab driver who liked to listen to music on the
radio and hum.
What I found fascinating about the remark is that the geneticist (if indeed he really was
one, not just a nameless authority) somehow imagined or intuited that music itself was
part of the genetic package, even if genius wasn't. (My intuitions would point in the
other direction, and suppose that genius or brain power-as great uncles used to call it-is
more likely to be a physically conveyable capacity )
If cloning Mozart is somehow involved with a taste for music, then a clone of Kant might
have a taste for candied fruit and shooting pool, and a done of Hitler would be nice to
dogs. This seems dose to nonsense, if not madness.
I am suggesting that, in the context of cloning humans, the question "What is being
cloned?" properly understood requires a prior investigation of "What is a
human?"
Since we are humans, and self awareness does not appear to be an automatic faculty of our
species (observe how our mythology sneers at Narcissus for his agenda of self analysis),
the question of what is a human is just the sort of question that irritates the many,
frustrates the technologist, enriches the philosopher. Most of us don't know the answer,
but we know something that, for our practical purposes, is better than the answer. We know
what a human does.
A human wants.
And what is bizarre, and it doesn't take Freud to know this, is that what humans want is
infinitely various. Tastes and accomplishments and inclinations-whether they arise
genetically (our cloned cabbie listening to Shostakovich) or environmentally (Irishmen
tending to sing Irish songs) or some other way (Mozart/muse/reincarnation)-whatever it is
that humans want is also the token or totem of their self definitions.
I am what I want. That seems to be the deepest truth for us, that we identify our very
being with all of the many inclinations-sexual, political, ethical, religious,
consociative-that we feel.
So from that point of view we might in fact discover that human cloning has been going on
for years now, and its biochemistry is called propaganda or advertising, since by such
means one human is made to inherit or inhabit the house of preference, the house of
desire, built for another. But to go on in this vein would be spoilsport of me-I know what
we all want, real cloning, hardedged science, the real thing, gold and pink and cocoa
babies tumbling out of the assembly line full of All Desirable Qualities.
Do I err in supposing we should first really find out what these inclinations, velleities,
tastes, desires really are? Should we find out whether or how they connect in turn with
the creative or industrious qualities we seek to replicate by means of cloning?
At the moment, I am yielding to a trinitarian inclination, embedded in me by my language
(your language, I'd say, if I were being confrontational), our Judaeo-Christian heritage,
our trinitarian system of government. I am haunted by a trinitarian anxiety: I am afraid
that when conception takes place in a living system, there is a father component and a
mother component-and there may be something more.
This something more can be, if you like, dismissed as trinitarian guesswork or Ol' Soul
sneaking back in, and I won't quarrel with you too much. I think it's worth thinking
about, though just thinking, I mean. Not much here to measure. As with the behavior of
subatomic particles, you can only see (if you can even see) where they've been, not where
they are or what they're about to do now. What they’re about to do next is
discussable only statistically.
And since statistics is a science that measures no thing, we could even think
statistically about the Third Thing that creeps into the act of human conception. By and
large, it seems to produce behavior oddly different from the behaviors of other animals we
know much about, yet with odd kinships too. All creatures seem to know themselves from
somebody else. All crows watch their backs. So there must be some sense of anxiety, some
sense of identity conveyed by this Third Thing.
But this Third Thing when it involves humans seems to come bundled with a pressure to
articulate, and hence symbolize, and hence eventually realize, the very inclinations that
use for their own purposes the cellular hypostasis of body and consciousness with which
the science of genetics concerned itself up till now.
I am daring to propose a sort of prolegomenon to any future human genetic engineering:
such a study must carefully and sustainedly and subtly examine the very qualities we wish
to replicate. The qualities we seek may be gifts of that Third Thing, and may accordingly
be capable of being roused in us by acts of education and influence vastly beyond anything
we've ever studied in our hard-edged conventional paideumas. It may be that the qualities
we want can indeed be cloned, not by cloning the base metal of human gonadic production,
but by influencing the consciousness of !he parents, the consciousness of the fetus
itself. Who can say?
We have not studied what precisely it is we want to achieve, and we will be in no real
position to done anything humanly worthwhile until we have done that intense and
unprecedented work. Because the specific gifts of consciousness (Mozart, Fermat,
Ramanujan, etc.) we want, and want to replicate, may be all round us, latent in us
already, and may infuse individuals in subsequent generations without the prod of the
geneticist's magic wand. The wand in question may be Hermes's staff itself, the meditative
act which studies the world so quietly that the most contradictory serpents can peacefully
twine round it.
I mean it's time to think clearly about what we are, and what we want us to be. This life
and next life. Who is it, what is it, that we want to clone? Tread gently-we ate on sacred
ground. Vagueness here will certainly be the death of us. ///