A Clone of Your Own? The Science and Ethics of Cloning

  • Arlene Judith Klotzko
Oxford University Press: 2004. 162 pp. £12.99 0192803093 | ISBN: 0-192-80309-3

For members of the general public confused by the heated debate generated by human cloning, A Clone of Your Own? does an admirable job in explaining many of the complicated ethical and scientific issues without giving way to academic jargon. Drawing from literature, the visual arts, films and her personal experiences, Arlene Judith Klotzko has created a comprehensible overview of cloning.

Klotzko tells us about the early experiments that Aristotle did with chicken embryos; about a German scientist, Hans Spemann, who figured out the theory of cloning some sixty years before we actually succeeded in cloning mammals; about Dolly, the first cloned sheep, and other work done at Edinburgh's Roslin Institute; and the current successes and failures in attempts to clone mammals. She explains the basics of embryology and provides an overview of stem-cell research.

The book paints a picture of human cloning as a worthwhile enterprise. Klotzko lists the various potential benefits that therapeutic cloning could have, and explains why we might have reservations about reproductive cloning, even if it should not be banned completely. She also, following several others, clarifies many of the common misconceptions concerning the identity of clones, and puts in plain words the restricted effect that genes have in shaping the kind of people we become.

For a book with radical pretensions, Klotzko's arguments are restrained in their defence of human reproductive cloning — she is impressed by the supposed risks entailed. One of the major objections to any current attempt to clone a human is that, in the case of Dolly, only one clone was successfully produced after 277 attempts. Cloning is inefficient and wastes many embryos. But embryo wastage cannot be an objection to reproductive cloning for those who accept natural reproduction — after all, about 80% of embryos perish in natural reproduction. For every live birth, 3–5 embryos are created only to die.

We must remember that giving birth in the normal way isn't safe for the mother or the child. It is so risky that early abortion is safer for the mother than childbirth. Moreover, 3–5% of babies born have some abnormality. So the safety of reproductive cloning is at best a contingent argument that fails utterly if cloning could be made safe. Furthermore, the safety argument is interestingly two-edged. If any reproductive technology, including cloning, could be made safer than normal sexual reproduction (as may well eventually happen), then those who regard safety as decisive would have to abjure sexual reproduction for its safer technology-based counterpart.

The great promise of cloning in terms of human welfare, however, lies in the use of these techniques not for reproduction but for therapeutic purposes. The regenerative properties of stem cells that make them so attractive as a possible therapeutic tool also mean that the distinction between therapy and enhancement will inevitably be further eroded. Treatments that cause tissue to repair itself in situ and go on doing so are likely to extend lifespan. If therapies are developed that modify cells to be resistant to cancer or HIV/AIDS, this will create unprecedentedly enhanced humans. Anyone who is disturbed by such a prospect will have the most agonizing of choices to make if the promise of stem-cell research is fulfilled.

A Clone of Your Own? provides engaging and clear explanations of both the basic scientific issues and related ethical issues surrounding cloning. Klotzko appears to have drawn on a wide range of published work on the ethics of cloning, and makes a large proportion of the arguments in the literature accessible in this short book. However, readers who are unaware of the literature may be left with the impression that Klotzko is the first, and almost the only, person to have written on the ethics of cloning, which is far from the case. It is a pity that the author and the publisher have provided so little reference to the extensive ethics literature and given so little sign that they are even aware of it. Whether one's interest lies in the science or the ethics of cloning, the short list of further reading provided at the end of the book is unhelpful and misleading.

But this caveat aside, the drawings and other illustrations, and Klotzko's narration, make the book highly approachable. Members of the public who would like to understand what the debate on human cloning is all about should read this book.