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The
world woke up on February 23, 1997, to the fact that the era of
cloning had dawned. At the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland,
embryologist Ian Wilmut produced a live adult lamb from cells
originating in a sheep mammary gland. The method was simple, technologically
speaking; Wilmut took a mammary cell from an adult sheep and placed
its DNA into the egg of another sheep. He removed the egg’s
DNA and fused the adult DNA to the egg. The fused cell began to
grow and divide, just like a normal fertilized egg. It became
an embryo, was planted in the womb of a ewe and, at the time of
publication, was already a seven-month-old lamb named Dolly. DNA
tests show that Dolly contains only the genes of the adult ewe
who provided her DNA.
What
are the implications? Although concerns for animal cloning are
important, the overriding ethical issue is this: Should we clone
human beings? President Bill Clinton’s National Bioethics
Advisory Commission has said “no,” by placing a ban
on cloning for the purposes of creating human beings. In a press
conference, the U.S. president said that replicating ourselves
by this method would violate our individual identity and that
we should not “play God.” The Church of Scotland agree.
Donald Bruce, who directs the church’s Society, Religion
and Technology Project—a committee on which Ian Wilmut serves—described
human cloning as a “perversity.” To use technology to
replicate a human being is against the basic dignity of our uniqueness
in God’s sight, Bruce told the press. Cloning would be ethically
unacceptable as a matter of principle, because it violates the
uniqueness of our lives, which God has given to each of us and
to no one else.
The
argument raised by the U.S. President and the Church of Scotland
fits with the fears of many people, namely, that cloning would
compromise human identity and violate human dignity. Widespread
is the assumption that who we are is determined by our genetic
code, that our DNA is our destiny. With this assumption we can
see why some might feel their identity would be compromised when
another person shares the same genome. Who we are is influenced
by our DNA, to be sure, but how the genes behave is influenced
also by environmental factors. These environmental factors include
the cytoplasm in the host egg, as well as our nutrition and socialization
while growing up. In addition, common sense gained from everyday
observation reveals that no matter how much two people share in
common they still differ. Who we are as individual persons is
determined by three things: our genome, our environmental influences,
and the appearance of a subjective self with free will and the
ability to engage in self-definition.
The
experience of identical twins is informative. For siblings to
be identical means they have the same genome. Yet, each twin grows
up with his or her own subjectivity and own sense of identity;
and he or she can claim his or her own individual rights. The
experience of a cloned person would be similar. The clone would
be aware that another person shares the same genetic code, and
might even find this fascinating, yet he or she would be just
as much an individual as any of the rest of us. It would be society’s
moral obligation to treat cloned persons as respected individuals.
It would be most unfortunate to see the fear that cloned persons
have less identity become translated by society into a stigma
in which such persons are denied dignity.
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| Contributed by: Dr. Ted Peters
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