Liberation biology - molecular biologist Lee M. Silver - Interview

Reason, May, 1999 by Ronald Bailey

Reason: OK. (Laughter.)

Silver: Which is amazing. Of course, he's a clone. I didn't do an exact count, but I looked at the hands raised and it was about two-thirds. My point is that people - even educated people - still don't know what cloning is. They have the notion that cloning is more than it really is. People think of the word in a context beyond genetics, that somehow there is a soul that has been replicated in some way that goes beyond the genes. And when I explain that the genes are the same but that the human being that develops is not the same as the human being that existed before, the response I get from lots of people is, "Is that all it is?" So I think the word is actually used incorrectly. You are not copying a person. You are having a child born who has all his genetic material from one parent. When biologists talk about cloning, they are talking about just copying genes. Nothing else. But in this culture, the word has a different meaning - copying, replicating, duplicating.

Now all of a sudden, Ian Wilmut says he cloned a sheep. If he had used a different word, I don't think it would have caused the same response. I also think that there are people who are against cloning for religious reasons and who know perfectly well what is going on, but who are willing to take advantage of the confusion to reach a certain political goal.

Reason: Who and why?

Silver: Oh. I think that it is from a right-to-life perspective. Some people believe that God controls reproduction, and we shouldn't be messing with reproduction, period. And if God doesn't want you to have babies, you shouldn't have babies. And if God decides that you are going to have a baby with a birth defect, well, then that is the way it has to be. This is a religious point of view, and cloning is seen as one more way in which we are interfering with God's will.

Reason: Are embryos people?

Silver: The confusion people have is with the meaning of the words life and alive. We use the words in two very different ways, one meaning vegetative life, the other conscious life. To biologists, life in a vegetative sense simply means the life of cells. In fact, in this beaker [gestures toward beaker containing a pinkish fluid], there are living human cells. Millions of human cells. They are perfectly alive and they are perfectly human, but they are not conscious. But when you talk about human beings and persons, we are talking about consciousness. The best example of the difference that I know of is what happens when a person is shot with a bullet in the heart - he dies almost instantly. And yet, most of his body is still alive. So the person is dead, even though his body, for the most part, is alive. That is the distinction between vegetative life and conscious life. Human embryos are cells, and they are alive in a vegetative sense, not a conscious sense.

Reason: So would you be comfortable with saying something like, "Brains are people and genes are not people?"

Silver: Well, it is the mind that comes out of the brain - and that is sort of a subtle distinction. But I think it is an important distinction. The brain gives rise to the mind, and people, I think, are defined by those minds. Now, genes play a role in building the brain. Genes provide the framework for the human mind. The human mind, of course, is a dynamic entity, while its genes are static.