Editorial

Over the last decade, cloning has gone from a wild science-fictional speculation to a policy issue. Not long after the first successful cloning of a mammal, legislatures were rushing to prohibit human cloning. Adherents of many different ideologies agreed that human cloning is at best unnecessary, and at worst a threat.

On the other hand, a few people see cloning differently, as the fulfillment of their hopes or dreams. Researchers who express an interest in trying to produce a human clone have more than enough prospective volunteers. And the main motive for this interest seems to be a familiar one: the desire to have a family and pass on one’s genetic heritage. or that of a person one loves. There don’t seem to be many power-obsessed megalomaniacs hoping to create cloned armies. or vain multimillionaires wanting to copy themselves or dreaming of having their own personal organ donors for transplants. But there are infertile people, same-sex couples, and people who have lost a child or partner, all much more understandable and sympathetic motives. And, happily, the kind of cloning such people would benefit from is much easier than the kind that would produce a robotic army, or an enslaved organ donor.

Such nightmarish visions have proposed before, in response to earlier reproductive technologies. For example. in Germany in the 1920s, a popular novel inspired two films, both titled Alraune. Their theme was the dangers of a new reproductive technology, artificial insemination.

In these films, a doctor obsessed with scientific experimentation obtains semen from a hanged murderer, and uses it to impregnate a notorious prostitute. The result is a "mandrake," a child with unnatural powers and without normal human feelings. (This name alludes to the legend that mandrake plants spring up beneath the corpses of hanged men; the child has a psychic bond to a plant growing under her father’s gallows.) The implication is clear: the child of a new reproductive technology is not truly human, lacking a soul, but having abnormal powers and a natural inclination to evil. The fears are remarkably like those that surround clones in more recent novels and films—and now in actual legislation.

In fact, artificial insemination was used for much more ordinary purposes: to enable infertile people to have children. And we may hope that the time will come when cloning is seen simply as a routine reproductive option for such people (as science fiction writers such as Bujold envision it), and attempts to ban it will be seen as hopelessly archaic. Perhaps in another century people who have cloned themselves will be telling wild stories about children with wholly synthetic genomes, and calling for a ban on such risky and unnatural reproductive technologies, with no more sense of historical irony than today’s opponents of cloning possess.