In God We Trust, All Others Provide Data
My wife and I have discussed having kids. The ideal scenario would be to have a boy and a girl. I mentioned (depending on the gender of the first child) that the second be determined. There’s a procedure where they take sperm, spin it in a gadget, and separate the sperm more likely to yield boys from sperm more likely to yield girls. My wife wasn’t repulsed by the idea but my parents were. They said it was unnatural and all the other moral/religious/unnatural type things people say about stuff like that. Where do we draw the line in mucking about with nature? I don’t know. The capability of determining the sex of a child didn’t freak me out. Genetic engineering to eliminate disease sounds OK to me as well. Stem cell research seems promising.
Now, someone has gone and cloned a baby. Mind you, they have not provided proof as yet, which is curious. And I won’t believe it until I see proof. It doesn’t matter though because eventually someone will clone a human anyway. Oh, and the folks that supposedly did it are part of a cult. They believe that humans were created by aliens (I’m making a circular motion around my head area with my index finger, if you catch my meaning).
To paraphrase a famous line: science becomes more concerned with if they can do something and never bother to ask if they should do it. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this from a moral standpoint. It definitely gives me the willies. Soon, there may be a religious/moral fervor over things like: does it have a soul? Is it an ‘it’ or a girl? Can it get a Social Security card? Or (since it’s a clone of an existing person) does it already have one? Are its fingerprints already on file? Should it pay taxes?
An informal poll at CNN said 80% of us are against cloning. I am against it too. My reasoning has nothing to do with the moral issues of ‘playing God.’ My reasons are because I fear what existing humans would do with clones. Suddenly, a corporation could clone an entire workforce. And without legislation, they could essentially claim them as property. Then folks are out of jobs, people debate the treatment of the clones, and then bad movies are made about the scenario in which the clones finally revolt and take over the world. Or some government clones soldiers. Or a whacko clones a master race. Or clone them to do laboratory experiments on them. Etc., etc. If we get all this nonsense squared away, I may have to develop an opinion on cloning as a moral issue. However, the debate will end up identical to abortion. Essentially, two groups of people believe two different things and there is no way they can convince the other of their view.
Are there advantages to cloning? I’d say so. Off the top of my head, I’d say we could probably grow replacement organs that work right the first time (since they’re based on your genetic code). People incapable of having kids could have them made. And I’m sure there are more.
Disadvantages? Yeah, it gives me the willies and I don’t think we (the human race) can deal with it. Of course, the major problem with the human race is that it’s always creating problems it can’t deal with to the satisfaction of all (or heck most) of the population. Nukes, famine, nation building, to name a few.
The bottom line is that even if I had no moral qualms about cloning, the human race is not ready for this type of thing and the questions it will raise, aside from playing God/Mother Nature.
