Ian Wilmut Actively Promoting Reproductive Cloning
The man who led the team that cloned Dolly the sheep--he didn't do the actual cloning--has come out in favor of reproductive cloning for therapeutic purposes. That is, he would like to use cloning and genetic engineering to eradicate serious inherited disease.
Wilmut has always been interested in genetic engineering. A veterinarian, he first worked on cloning to permit animals to be genetically engineered so as to provide therapeutic substances in their milk. He once said he had no interest in human cloning, but that assertion became inoperative when his animal cloning project went bust. Now he works in human cloning research at Edinburgh University.
The slippery slope is sliding away even before we know whether humans can actually be cloned. And of course, even if we could do "therapeutic" reproductive cloning, it wouldn't be very long before the solipsistic began to demand the right to enhance their offspring to fit parental desires--backed by many bioethicists and members of the scientific establishment who only oppose reproductive cloning now because it isn't "safe."
I agree with the United Nations General Assembly that voted by a 3-1 margin urging member states to "prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are compatible with human dignity and the protection of human life."
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:04 AM
5 Comments
5 Comments:
Wesley, it seems to me that we are well down the path to believing that parents have a right to kids who meet the expections we have to meet our needs. I think IVF and embryo screening selective reduction abortions indicate that. There seems to be a strong undercurrent in consumer society that children are to meet the needs of parents and that they are more extensions of the parent than ends in and of themselves. I think there’s also an element that says it would be cruel to let children with certain genes come into the world.
Sometimes I wonder if my mother would have survived the embryo screening process and the coming designer baby process. She lived 59 years, the last two dying from cancer. What if some embryologist said… “we can’t let this little one in. She’ll die from cancer with that predisposing to cancer gene. It would be cruel to let her live and come to that kind of end.”
I frequently think about your comment that physically and mentally handicapped people are some of the most wonderful people you’ve ever known. There’s something seriously missing in our desire for a perfect world.
Don, I suspect one of the things that has derailed our society into the consumerism you mentioned is the idea that our children can legitimately by treated as consumer commodities. When we began to consider children as assets impacting our net worth, we began to redefine our children (and ourselves, by implication) as less than human, at least in the classical and more traditional sense of the term human. Even the term net worth implies a reduction of human value to the results of a mathematical process.
Along with this shopping around for children, I would suggest a correlation with the kind of 'life planning' strategies that have resulted in a whole suite of problems, including widespread fiscal irresponsibility, basic public health crises, runaway government regulation, etc. Perhaps the current slippery slope of devaluation of human life is only a symptom of our lack of attentiveness to the very real possibility that the world as it was before these interferences of ours had already incorporated our optimal 'life plans' to some extent. Perhaps we have acted out of ignorance in attempting to control what is natural, and the contemporary debates over the value of human life and many other issues need not have arisen.
Still, they have arisen, and we are now engaged in damage control measures. In my experience, understanding the dysfunctions we humans have brought upon ourselves can be a powerful structural influence, calling us at once to examine thoroughly our technological options as well as maintaining before our minds an ideal against which we might measure ourselves.
Well, whatever.
I mean: of the two, "reproductive" cloning* is clearly the LESSER of the two evils, clearly less evil than creating human beings purely to destroy them.
* Of course, "reproductive" and "therapeutic" cloning are poor labels. If you create a new embryo via cloning, you have reproduced -- case closed -- whether you intend to let that embryo live or not.
'Lesser' by one measure, then? BMMG39, your second paragraph suggests that you're aware of the inadequacy of a single measure of greater or lesser evil, given that you've noticed that reproductive and therapeutic cloning are alike in at least one way. If they are alike, what is the meaning, in your opinion, of claiming that one is more evil than the other?
To put it another way, are truth, goodness, and beauty subject to degrees? Or do we simply have difficulty amid the complexity of circumstances to see clearly that which is ultimately true, good, and beautiful? Perhaps reproductive and therapeutic cloning are to be treated in a specific way morally and ethically because of their conformity or lack thereof to a true, good, and beautiful ideal.
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