Monkeying Around with the Self

Reason, April, 2001 by Cathy Young

Why support for biotech shouldn't foreclose the debate over its moral issues.

By now, the script is predictable. A new breakthrough in biotechnology, actual or only planned, is announced and breathlessly hyped in the media; pundits left and right respond with variations on the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it theme; libertarians blast those who would restrict progress in the name of authoritarian moralism and fear. But perhaps no one is entirely right. The shrill, mindless alarmism could inhibit important scientific advances; yet there is danger, too, in cavalier dismissal of moral concerns about how the quest to control our genetic destiny may affect humanity's basic view of itself.

The latest round in this debate was set off by two stories in the first month of 2001: the revelation that scientists at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center had bred the first genetically altered primate--ANDi ("inserted DNA" spelled backwards), a rhesus monkey with an added jellyfish gene--and the news that an American physiologist and an Italian fertility expert would attempt to clone a human being. "Creeping toward us...is perhaps the gravest imaginable crisis, one that could result in the end of history as a distinctively human, and humane, story," prophesied George Will in a January 21 column. Once genetic engineering is perfected in simians, he warned, human designer babies are next--and ultimately nothing less than "the abolition of humanity."

Just a few years ago, it was the sheep that could mean the end--Dolly the First Cloned Mammal, whose arrival sparked a hysteria-tinged debate riddled with misconceptions about cloning. Some scenarios came straight out of third-rate sci-fi movies: for instance, tyrants with armies of obedient clones. Actually, as psychologist Terrence Hines pointed out in The Skeptical Inquirer, clones are not drones, and cloning "would be an astonishingly costly and inefficient way of getting an army." It would make much more sense to grab children born the old-fashioned way and start instilling mindless obedience at an early age, as some real-life tyrants have done.

Fantastic visions of clone armies and clone slaves were invoked not only on conspiracy Web sites but in Time and U.S. News & World Report. In The New Republic, University of Chicago bioethicist Leon Kass wrote that "it is not at all clear to what extent a clone will truly be a moral agent," since his autonomy would be subverted by "the very fact of cloning, and of rearing him as a clone"--whatever that means.

If some egomaniac set out to have his cloned child reared so as to reproduce his own personality, or if bereaved parents had their dead child cloned (apparently not an uncommon aspiration, according to an article by Margaret Talbot in the February 4 New York Times Magazine) and tried to raise the new child as a copy of the one they lost, it would be a terrible infringement on the child's autonomy. Yet plenty of parents have treated their "natural" offspring as younger versions of themselves or replacements for deceased children; at worst, the fact that the child shares someone else's genetic code might provide an added incentive for the adults to ignore her individual uniqueness.

Of course, as cooler heads like Hines have pointed out, the cloned child would not only have different formative experiences than the "original" but would not even be an exact physiological replica. The donor egg into which the genetic material is inserted still contains its own mitochondrial DNA in its outer membranes; this genetic material will affect the development of the embryo, as will the womb environment. Even identical twins, who do share the same genetic makeup and the same womb, can have very different traits and personalities.

The real ethical problem of cloning, as REASON Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey argues, is that at present, mammals cloned from adult cells appear to be at high risk for congenital abnormalities. It would be immoral to expose a human infant to such risks. But if the procedure is perfected in nonhuman mammals to the point of being safe, cloning won't change the basic character of human beings.

"Designer babies" genetically altered for specific traits-the promise of ANDi, the monkey with the jellyfish gene--may pose a different dilemma.

For now, mammalian genetic engineering is at, well, an embryonic stage. The ANDi experiment involved 40 monkey embryos injected with the green fluorescent protein gene, which makes the jellyfish glow in the dark. Only three monkeys were born, and only one of them has the gene in its tissues--but it appears to be inactive, since ANDi doesn't glow. (Rodents implanted with the same gene do, faintly.) Although the human genome has been mapped, scientists are very far from exact knowledge of which genes affect which traits, under what circumstances, and in what combination.

But suppose that at some future point, science did acquire the ability to "customize" a human baby-to produce not only the desired height or eye color but such characteristics as reserve or extroversion, sensitivity or competitiveness, artistic or mathematical gifts. It seems to me that when one considers such a scenario, panicmongering about the damage to our sense of humanity is harder to dismiss. There is no reason to think that a cloned person will not be a moral agent, but can the same be said of a designer person?