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Justin Chen Paper 1: Debunking the Histrionics over Human Cloning In his essay entitled “Preventing a Brave New World: Why We Should Ban Human Cloning Now,” conservative bioethicist Leon Kass makes an impassioned appeal for the preservation of some nebulous concept of “humanity,” and he describes America’s descent into bioethical and moral equivalency in foreboding terms: “In case you had not noticed, the train has already left the station and is gathering speed, but no one seems to be in charge” (Kass 644). (1) To Kass, the debate over somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) represents yet another example of how America is slowly falling prey to the “slippery slope” in the debate over human reproductive freedom. He goes on to make a number of arguments against the development of SCNT technology, returning often to a highly emotional refrain about “repugnance,” which he suggests should lead all decent human beings to reject human cloning as a somehow intuitively abhorrent practice. In this essay, I want to show that while there are important arguments for the limiting of SCNT (at least for now), Kass’s particular brand of rhetoric does more to harm his case than help it. I will first discuss those aspects of his essay that I found problematic or unpersuasive, and then I will propose one of my own objections to human cloning that I feel better addresses the need for federal regulation over this powerful—and therefore potentially dangerous—new biotechnological field. Kass himself admits that “revulsion is not an argument,” going on to state that “some of yesterday’s repugnances are today calmly accepted” (Kass 648). Yet he maintains that “in some crucial cases, repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power completely to articulate it,” and he ultimately compares the revulsion one ought to feel at the prospect of human cloning to “the horror that is father-daughter incest (even with consent), or bestiality, or the mutilation of a corpse, or the eating of human flesh, or the rape or murder of another human being” (Kass 648). This is strong rhetoric, and before one is swept away in the crescendo of egregiously inhuman acts, one might do well to stop and consider whether his analogies are quite apt. In fact, many of the examples that Kass cites are offensive to human sensibilities not because of some poorly articulated gut instinct, but because of reasons that can actually be positively identified. Rape and murder, for instance, both involve clearly condemnable acts of violence against another person, while incest presents similar problems of violence due to an imbalance of power within a sexual relationship, and it also raises the issue of “consent” versus inducement. Also, it is questionable whether there is really an innate human impulse against the “mutilation of a corpse”—after all, cadavers are used in medical schools on a daily basis for the sake of instruction and greater understanding of the human body. The problem seems to arise from the practice of unsanctioned mutilation, or unauthorized access to corpses, which ultimately pertains not to an internal and indefinable revulsion, but rather reflects a natural consequentialist objection to certain actions whose effects can be seen as harmful. Bearing this distinction in mind, it seems more useful for the sake of debate to avoid such appeals to irrational rejection, and instead pinpoint the precise reasons that a well-reasoned American citizen ought not support human cloning research. Fortunately, Kass does eventually move beyond the string of the chilling but ultimately unhelpful sound bytes (i.e. “Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder” on pg. 648, or “Only the truly despotic souls will sleep the sleep of the innocent” on pg. 650). One argument that he raises is that the potential benefits of SCNT research simply are not compelling enough to outweigh the ethical dilemmas that it raises. “To treat infertility in people who are said to ‘have no other choice,’ to avoid the risk of severe genetic disease, to ‘replace’ a child who has died…for the sake of these rare benefits, they [the ‘sentimentalizers’ and certain bioethicists] would have us countenance the entire practice of human cloning, the consequences be damned” (Kass 646). While this line of reasoning strikes me as somewhat more compelling than his previous appeal to the principle of “repugnance,” I feel that Kass’s rhetoric has once again outstripped his own cause. The cases that Kass mentions are all perfectly valid reasons for wanting to pursue human cloning research. For instance, given the choice between conferring a potentially fatal genetic disease on one’s child and bypassing that risk by using SCNT technology to create an embryo bearing only the genome of the non-diseased parent, who would argue that the former alternative is better for the potential offspring? It could similarly be argued that both infertility and the desire to revive a deceased child, not to mention the possibility of creating a perfectly suited organ or blood donor, are all medically and personally relevant reasons for the pursuit of human cloning technology. Thus, it is not so clear that these objections can simply be lumped dismissively together and then rejected sight unseen as the product of an overly sentimental age. The next objection that Kass raises, and one that is shared by many who oppose SCNT research, is that “any child whose being, character, and capacities exist owing to human design does not stand on the same plane as its makers” (Kass 649). His argument appears to relate to the fact that cloning provides the “parents” with unusual power over their children because they consciously select the exact genome that is to be passed on. Yet it seems to me that parents necessarily possess this advantage—occupy a “different plane,” in Kass’s terms—over their children, simply by the fact that they are the sole agents in the creation of a new life. While Kass says that “such an arrangement is profoundly dehumanizing, no matter how good the product,” one wonders how much “humanity” an unborn life possesses to begin with, when there is no conscious willing into existence except by the parents. Why should the parents of an SCNT child be condemned as “artificers” while those who reproduce sexually are completely exempt from all such charges? Don’t all parents search for mates with desirable characteristics in order to produce the best possible offspring, and thus in a way exert “human design”? In other words, Kass has not proved that the passing on of only one genome is uniquely unjust to the unborn child. Kass also argues that “if it were successful, cloning would create serious issues of identity and individuality. The clone may experience concerns about his distinctive identity not only because he will be, in genotype and in appearance, identical to another human being, but because he may also be twin to the person who is his ‘father’ or his ‘mother’—if one can still call them that” (Kass 649). A similar concern is raised by Dan W. Brock in his essay entitled “Cloning Human Beings: An Assessment of the Ethical Issues Pro and Con,” where he suggests that “the later twin may feel, even if mistakenly, that his or her fate has already been substantially laid out, and so have difficulty freely and spontaneously taking responsibility for and making his or her own fate and life. The later twin’s experience or sense of autonomy and freedom may be substantially diminished” (Brock 639). (2) While this is an attractive argument on the surface, once again I would argue that such issues involving the “anxiety of influence” have not been shown to be unique to children produced by SCNT. First of all, children often face problems of identity and individuality, regardless of the means of their creation—sometimes due to the expectations set by overeager parents or the precedent established by an older sibling. More importantly, neither Kass nor Brock ever attempts to prove that one’s genetic makeup uniquely determines one’s fate or even phenotypic expression—an assumption that Kass at least seems to accept prima facie, but which I argue must be either duplicitous or at the very least naïve. While much of the rhetoric surrounding the controversy over SCNT seems to suggest that a human clone will be an exact expression of the somatic cell donor, just at a later point in history, it seems to me that this cannot possibly be true. One need only look to the case of twins who are conceived at the same time to realize that genetic material cannot be said to uniquely determine a person’s development. In fact, the situation is even less promising in the case of twins than it is in the hypothetical example of a clone—let’s say one produced from the “father’s” somatic cell—because unlike a twin, the cloned child will never have to “compete” with a concurrently existing genetic double for a unique sense of identity. Granted the offspring may instinctually follow the father’s developmental pathway in certain regards, but it would go against much of what we understand about the importance of nature versus nurture to imagine that a child would develop in exactly the same way. Firstly, a cloned child could never be brought up under the exact same circumstances as his or her “predecessor.” In the case of parents who decide to make a clone from one of the father’s somatic cells, the resulting child, while bearing the genome of the father, would nonetheless have a different set of parents, grow up in a different time period, and also presumably experience a different set of socioeconomic conditions. All these differences would exert subtle but powerful influences on the child’s development, and would ultimately ensure that the child exhibited a unique expression of the father’s genotype. Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco have recently shown that the attribute known as “perfect pitch”—the ability to recognize the absolute pitch of a musical tone without any reference note—is a highly inherited trait, suggesting that it may be controlled by a single gene, but that there is also a requirement of musical training before the age of six, suggesting a strong environmental component as well. Such findings lend credence to the notion that genetics on their own are not strong enough predictors of a person’s development and expression to suggest that human cloning must categorically be opposed for the sake of the children’s “identity and individuality.” Beyond such investigations of the interaction between genetics and environment, “maternal nutrition during pregnancy has been claimed to have enduring effects on the health status of the offspring postnatally and in later life, influencing mental and emotional health and susceptibility to cardiovascular disease and noninsulin-dependent diabetes mellitus” (Johnson 204), and it is now “reasonably clear that the experiences of the mother during pregnancy can have enduring effects on her offspring (Johnson 205). (3) Furthermore, the influence of maternal effect genes and mitochondrial DNA that is passed along to the developing embryo have not yet been fully explicated. In the the Drosophila embryo, maternal effect genes designate cytoskeletal asymmetries that in turn help guide the organism’s development. As the human developmental pathway becomes better understood, it will doubtless grow increasingly clear that there is much more to a person his or her DNA. Finally, I would like to address one of the general conceits of Kass’s piece—namely, his extrapolation from the current SCNT debate to the “dehumanized hell” (Kass 646) predicted by Aldous Huxley in his novel entitled A Brave New World. He argues that “the dehumanization that [Huxley] portrays does not really require despotism or external control. To the contrary, precisely because the society of the future will deliver exactly what we most want—health, safety, comfort, plenty, pleasure, peace of mind and length of days—we can reach the same humanly debased condition solely on the basis of free human choice” (Kass 644). This strikes me as a powerful but rather groundless appeal to what Kass must realize is an innate fear within all of us—that one day, humans will somehow become conditioned to accept a certain degraded value and a severely limited understanding of the world around them in exchange for the mediocre (perhaps even ignoble) ends listed in the passage excerpted above. Yet Huxley’s dystopic vision is not in the final analysis a statement about the implications of human cloning—though cloning technology is of course one of the primary means by which the disturbing society of his novel is created—but rather a chilling commentary on the inhuman ends to which the philosophy of total utilitarianism necessarily leads. Thus, in an attempt to paint the most frightening picture possible, Kass makes the common mistake of conflating technology with politics. Ted Peters, who chaired a three-year, $300,000 study for the Human Genome Project on the ethics of genetic technology, wrote a book on his findings entitled For the Love of Children: Genetic Technology and the Future of the Family, in which he concludes that the procedures themselves are morally neutral, but that the danger lies in our response to them—in whether we truly value the children produced via such means. Contrary to what Kass would have us believe, the development of human cloning does not necessarily lead us straight into the pits of a “dehumanized hell.” Instead, the value that each person, as well as society as a whole, places on individual human worth is ultimately much more important to the type of future we will imagine for all of our children, cloned or not. Unfortunately for Kass’s “slippery slope” view, the truth of the matter is that the once-disturbingly Frankensteinian prospect of creating life by artificial means has already become quite well established through the practice of in vitro fertilization (IVF), which raises all the very same specters of genetic selection and eugenically planned children that human cloning does. While Kass fears that the “engineering” aspect of human cloning will allow parents to try and “‘improve’ their offspring” (Kass 651), one wonders to what extent such options are not already available to Americans, especially with the rise in availability of sperm and egg donors. Now one can select those attributes one wants—i.e. height, hair color, SAT score—and engineer the child of your fantasies. Beyond the possibility that, for the right price, the extremely wealthy can produce offspring precisely tailored to their interests, money already plays a large role in determining the fate of a nascent life, arguably to a greater extent than genetics do. Economic well-being is, for better or for worse, still one of the greatest predictors of a child’s future “success” by most standards, but this circumstance has more to do with the functioning of our society than anything else, and it would be naïve to blame the emergence of SCNT technology for what is clearly an already extant desire to produce maximally advantaged offspring. In any event, because Americans seem to have accepted IVF as a viable means of creating life in the absence of other options, it is difficult to argue that human cloning represents some sort of ethically distinct new frontier that must not be pursued. Kass seems to support not just the halting of SCNT but also the dismantling of all reproductive modification technologies, a solution that I imagine would not be palatable to the American public for a number of reasons. While there are a number of other examples from Kass’s essay that could be rebutted in this manner, I would like to close by offering one argument that I feel would better address the real issue at hand. Kass insists that “the point is not that ‘nature knows best’” (Kass 649)—yet I would argue that here he has in a way rejected the one argument that actually speaks strongly against the use of human cloning. Indeed, the most important objection to SCNT technology is its poor performance thus far. Dolly the cloned sheep’s premature death, along with the discovery that her telomeres are abnormally short, suggest that the cloning technology used to create her is far from perfect. The problem of telomere truncation is reflected in premature aging effects by the fifth generation of cloned mice. Thus, it seems that the greatest problem of human cloning is the unintentional violence it does to the clone, simply because the technology is not yet properly developed. The solution to this, however, is not to ban human cloning research altogether, but rather to ensure that it is not used before it is fully understood to create children who will experience developmental or premature aging problems in the future. For many of the same reasons that one could find the use of embryos produced by IVF in stem cell research morally acceptable, including the “nothing is lost” provision, one could argue for the continuation of human cloning research. My point here is not to get into the similarities between those two debates, which could easily provide the basis for another very interesting and involved essay, but simply to point out that there is nothing in Kass’s argument that manages to convincingly explain why it is that SCNT is always wrong and should be categorically rejected. Much better, it seems to me, would be to acknowledge the problems that human cloning research currently represents and to provide legislation that defends the rights of the as-yet unborn without limiting America’s ability to pursue technology that actually does appear to have a great deal of beneficial potential. While Kass’s technique of raising the alarmist cry of utilitarian dystopias and eugenic selection is certainly grim and impressive in pure emotional force, it ultimately does not prove useful to the debate over human cloning research.
Sources Cited 1. Kass, Leon. “Preventing a Brave New World: Why We Should Ban Human Cloning Now.” Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine: 6th Edition (Ed. Bonnie Steinbock, John D. Arras, and Alex John London). New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 2003. 2. Brock, Dan W. “Cloning Human Beings: An Assessment of the Ethical Issues Pro and Con.” Ibid. 3. Johnson, Martin H. and Barry J. Everitt. Essential Reproduction: 5th Edition. Oxford: Blackwell Science Ltd. 2000. |