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"Many people wonder if this is a miracle for which we can thank God, or an ominous new way to play God ourselves." - Nancy Duff, Princeton Theological Seminary.
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5 July 1996 1700 hr.
A stable near Roslin Institute, Roslin, Scotland.
A small lamb is born; similar to every other sheep that sat as a dot on the landscape, but perfectly identical to only one.
Since the 1970s, new genetic and scientific discoveries have been more frequent. 1978 brought the infertility revolution, when Louise Brown was born. In vitro clinics spent their money on more research. Today it is possible to sort sperm and separate those sperm with Y chromosomes from those with X chromosomes, essentially parents now have control over the sex of their children. It is also possible for women to give birth to their grandchildren, and for men to give birth by way of caesarean. Ethical? Should men be allowed to give birth to their children? Should grandparents be allowed to act as segregate mothers to their grandchildren? Should human cloning be legal, or is it too unethical?
It took 277 attempts to clone and udder cell (an udder cell was needed to provide the new nucleus for the egg), which led to the creation of Dolly. The sheep that provided the udder cell, ironically, was butchered and sold unknowingly. You ate her, her udder cells were merely units of convenience. The proposal that humans can be cloned, to act as couriers of back-up body parts, is the reversal of this irony. In the future we will not think twice when we pluck the marrow from our clones. Their optic nerves, spare kidneys, and cardiovascular organs will be of great importance to us, but we will not give a second thought as to the fate of the mass they were physically derived from.
But new technology, especially discoveries relating to the medical industry, often change things for good once they are sorted out. My brother, when aged just eight, was the first human in Australia to undergo optical surgery involving a laser technique. Who will be the first human in Australia to be cloned? Dolly's mother was one unit of commercial resource in a crowd of millions of other sheep. My brother as one human in a crowd of millions. Louise Brown, one in a crowd of billions. Science can give life to anyone, no matter who they are.
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"The question was posed, 'Is there not a time when you say to the bee, neither your honey nor your sting?' And so, we are really prepared to ban cloning, to give up the honey, because we are so afraid of the sting?"
- Moshe Tedler, testimony before the National Biogenethics Advisory Commission, 14 May 1997.
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