Season 4, Episode 12: The Sounds of Science
Bob finds out that his partner Nina's baby is his clone. David recommends aborting the fetus because, as he maintains, it is not really Bob's son. Bob insists that this clone is, in fact, his child and he plans to raise him.
Hello Dolly: One (Very Important) Sheep's Story
On July 5th, 1996, Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and their colleagues at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland successfully cloned the world’s first living mammal, Dolly (the Sheep). Dolly died on February 13th, 2003, of lung disease at the tender age of six – roughly half the age of an average sheep.
Along with this first successful reproduction of a full mammal, many ethical questions arose: What, if any, are the physical and/or psychological harms to the clone? Are we "playing God" by cloning? Has science gone too far? Should we clone human beings? What are clones morally and legally? Why clone?
David raised two specific objections to cloning a human in this episode: first, cloned animals are more prone to disease; and second, they age faster than normal animals. But one could answer: so what? The potential benefits might possibly outweigh the risks.
Therapeutic vs. Reproductive Cloning
An important distinction exists between so-called "therapeutic" and "reproductive" cloning. Generally, therapeutic cloning, or cloning to produce stem cells for research, means that a cloned embryo is created in order to isolate embryonic stem cells - that is, those cells that can become any particular kind of cell - that are a genetic match to a patient, in hopes of then using those cells to treat the patient. Advocates of the technology suggest that therapeutic cloning could potentially help Alzheimer's or Parkinson's patients, or other patients with damaged or defective cells, tissues and organs. And because they'd be a perfect genetic match to the patient, they could eliminate the need for anti-rejection medications that are needed for other types of transplants, like a kidney transplant from a donor who is genetically similar but not identical to the patient.
Reproductive cloning, on the other hand, means that cloning is used for the purposes of creating a whole organism (like Dolly, our sheep-friend). If we could reproduce entire humans this way, then perhaps we could help eliminate diseases or even emphasize certain "good" character traits by cloning people without genetic diseases and/or with those "good" traits. This is what Olivier Roth was trying to do; he wanted to generate a clone of Bob that would be empathic from birth. But it's important to emphasize that most countries, including Canada, have banned reproductive cloning and that the United Nations also have a declaration against the act.
Although both of these applications of cloning technologies raise many ethical questions, given the subject matter in tonight's episode of ReGenesis, let's focus on reproductive cloning, and two major issues in particular that arise from it: understanding what is a person, and asking whether what is unnatural is necessarily immoral or "bad".
What is a Person? What is Personal Identity?
In some form or another, most people have asked themselves 'what am I?' Philosophers have struggled with this question since at least the days of Socrates and Plato, and likely long before them. And since there is no simple way of answering these questions - if they can be answered at all - let's try to understand some of the issues that typically arise when talking about a "person" and how they might relate to cloning.
One of the first questions is whether a person is just the biological matter of his or her physical body, or whether the person is something more. Maybe we humans are only animals like other apes and mammals. If so, there's nothing special about being human that differentiates us from other animals.
Alternatively, many religious or spiritual people believe that a person is not just the physical "stuff" but also something more: maybe, for example, all persons have souls. That begs another question: If we do have souls, how do we get them? Are we born with them or is there some other process through which we come to have or develop them?
So what about clones? Would they be animals or soul possessors? Does it matter? Would they be different in a non-biological sense from other human beings, or would they be persons like any other? Could and should they be given full rights and be entitled to the same protection and liberties as anybody else? Though clones of an existing person, they would be independent beings and perhaps that's enough to make a person a person in the moral sense. But is there any way in which persons born of natural reproduction take moral superiority over clones? David seems to imply such a distinction when he says that Bob's son is not, in fact, his "son", but is "just his clone." But on what is David basing this position?
This brings us to another issue: that of family structures and relationships. Normally, the only people who share the exact same DNA are identical twins. Each twin is in no way made less of a person because they have the same DNA as their brother or sister. But if reproductive cloning could be perfected for humans, and if you were cloned, would your clone be your sibling or your child? Or is your clone something else? Is it you? Probably not; no more than twins are the same person. But some people are very uncomfortable about clones - even if they would be little more than "delayed twins".
Some might argue, for example, that clones completely change the notion of the individual and the family, and who knows where that could lead. But others could counter that the traditional "family unit" - that is, a father, a mother, and children - is a thing of the past. Just look around. Today, families consist of single parents, adoptive parents, and same-sex parents, just to name of few.
Besides, if the clone isn't physically harmed - though from a scientific perspective, this is still a major obstacle for cloning - what's the danger? Some commentators would argue that who we are - that is, our identities - are shaped by our relationships with others, and so even if the traditional family unit no longer exists, we must still be aware of the potential difficulties that could arise in a new family relationship - like having a clone for a child - that no human has ever encountered.
Is Unnatural Immoral?
Another common response is to dismiss cloning as bad because it's unnatural (sometimes expressed as "playing God"). Although it is true that many things in nature are good for us (for example, clean air is "natural" and important when trying to staying alive), it's not always the case that things in nature are what we'd normally say are "good". For example, if a great white shark attacks a swimmer, one could say that the shark acted naturally but that the attack is still a bad event. Plants, insects and animals, while natural, can also produce a variety of chemicals that are highly toxic, while some medicines produced in laboratories may be synthetic (that is, unnatural) and yet help improve and save lives, which is usually considered good.
The important thing to remember is that although the ethical questions surrounding cloning are difficult to answer, merely saying that cloning is unnatural is not enough to tell us whether that's good or bad.
-- Diego S. Silva, MA
About the Author
Diego S. Silva is doctoral student in Public Health Science at the University of Toronto. His research interests include public health ethics, organizational ethics, and transplantation ethics.
Want to read and learn more?
Read a news article on the ethics and legality of cloning and other reproductive technologies in Canada here:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/genetics_reproduction/rgtech.html
Check out this primer on Ethics and Human Cloning:
http://www.actionbioscience.org/biotech/mcgee.html
Canada's laws around cloning are part of the Assisted Human Reproduction Act (2004, c. 2 ):
http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/A-13.4/index.html
