Originally published 20 March 2001
I started writing this column on cloning six months ago, then put it aside.
At that time I said, “Cloning by nuclear transfer is not easy. Dolly [the Scottish sheep] was the sole success out of 277 attempts. The success rate for all cloning experiments is only a few percent. Most clones die in the womb or at birth, many with abnormalities. Given these difficulties, the cloning of humans would not seem to be an immediate prospect.”
No one, it seemed to me then, would try cloning a human when the odds against success were so long. The birth of a deformed child or the wreckage of so many embryos had the potential to bring the house down on the heads of the cloning researchers. Cloning is controversial in the best of circumstances; failure would be a public relations (and moral) catastrophe.
I underestimated how quickly cloning fever would advance. Today, the media are full of reports of imminent human clones. Perhaps the most serious venture is that proposed by reproductive physiologist Panos Zavos of the University of Kentucky and Italian fertility doctor Severino Antinori. They intend to try cloning a human baby sometime within the next few years. For all we know, someone else may already have tried.
The brave new world of human cloning is presumably upon us.
The ethical, philosophical, and theological debates will now begin in earnest.
At the heart of the debates is a question that has been around since the dawn of time: What is the human self?
This much is certain: The human self is not a “thing,” like a chair or a motorcycle. Every cell in a human body is replaced every year or two; some organs are renewed on a weekly or monthly basis. Old cells make new ones, then expire. The material stuff of the human self blows in and out of the body like an unceasing wind.
What lets a self endure is not atoms but information.
Every cell in a human body contains an arm’s length of DNA that, in principle, contains the biochemical blueprint for building a replica of the body. In fact, day by day, hour by hour, cell by cell, a living creature clones itself. For example, the cells in the irises of a person’s eyes come and go; that’s atoms. But the genes determine that the eyes stay brown or blue or green; that’s information.
A person’s genetic code could be transcribed into an electronic data bank (or carved on stone tablets if you had enough stone) and used a hundred or a thousand years from now to create a physical replica of the person. In principle, creating a future clone would not require the preservation of actual DNA, only the information contained therein. Information is potentially immortal.
Of course, no human clone will be a perfect replica of the original person, even if the genetic information is exactly preserved. The expression of genes is dependent upon the chemical environment in which they are expressed. A clone might be subtly different at birth from the DNA donor, as an identical twin can be subtly different from his or her sibling.
But, even if physical replication were exact, the clone would certainly not replicate a human self. After all, identical twins are physical clones, and no one doubts that they qualify as separate and unique human selves. A human self is more than a genome.
A self is also a rich store of conscious and unconscious memories, an always growing ensemble of experiences somehow stored as webs of neurons in the brain. In principle, this is information, too. A wiring diagram showing the connections and potentiation of every one of the myriad neurons in the brain might also be stored in a computer or carved in stone and used a thousand years from now to reproduce even the adult mental states of a future clone, although how this might be done is not even remotely imaginable.
The essence of the self then is information — information embodied in that flux of flowing matter called life, partly inborn, partly acquired through experience. As the ancients guessed, the soul is immaterial and potentially immortal, but they were apparently wrong about the ability of that immaterial thing to express itself in the absence of matter. Information must be stored in a physical medium if it is to endure.
Dolly was news. The first human clone will be a sensation, and will focus a sharp fierce light on the nature of the human self. No one likes to think about these things. We prefer to think of the human soul as a sort of dreamy, ethereal thing that visits the world of matter briefly and then goes off to sit on a cloud and play a harp. The gritty biotechnical future promises something rather different.
