I’ve been thinking about cloning lately. I know the big debate on cloning was last year when Scottish scientists successfully cloned Dolly the sheep. All the pundits came out in the newspapers and tee vee and said this or that and it all went away and we forgot about it for a few months until Richard Seed, the Doctor Strangelove of Chicago, announced his intention to clone humans. Then it started in all over again with the pundits and the tee vee and even the president poked his head out and said he was opposed to research that might lead to the cloning of humans. I think we all know by now that when it comes to reproduction, the president continues to favor the old-fashioned methods, but regardless of what he or anyone else says, now that this cloning box is opened, it will be very hard to close up again.
This is true of every technology. Leo Szilard, the Hungarian physicist who was the first to imagine the terrible power that could be released by splitting the atom, helped to design the nuclear bomb and then tried to stop the government from using it. He could not.
So it is with Dolly. Now that cloning has been accomplished, it’s only a matter of time before we see more of it. All the pundits who talk about cloning talk about cloning humans. It’s an important debate and I’ll leave it to those better qualified to address it than I. There are other endpoints for cloning technology that are just as ethically dubious, and as far as I can tell, no one is talking about them.
I can see the day when a developer announces the construction of a subdivision right in the middle of prime black bear habitat. The developer announces that all the bears in the area will be killed, humanely, and a sample of genetic material from each bear will be saved so a new group of the same bears can be cloned, raised and released into another wilderness habitat, where perhaps they will be killed and cloned again.
By combining cloning with other genetic manipulation techniques, the gene pool for California Condors can be doubled or tripled without leaving the test tube.
Millionaire big game hunters will win awards from conservation foundations, because after they bagged that rare mountain goat or snow leopard, they saved some tissue so it could be recreated and put back into the wild. It adds a whole new meaning to catch and release.
I can hear new phrases coming to the debates on endangered species – congressmen will refer to salmon as “functionally extinct, but surviving as genotypes.”
While all this may amount to a huge leap forward for science, it’s also a huge leap forward in our human tendency to play God, perhaps our tendency to think we are God.
None of this has yet happened and the New England spring is lovely. We still have a few more years to watch the spring unfold of its own accord, to wait for calves and goslings to arrive as they always have. We still have a few more seasons to hope, vainly perhaps, that our wisdom will soon catch up with our cleverness.
We still don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg, but I have a good idea which will be around in the end.
Functional Extinction
I’ve been thinking about cloning lately. I know the big debate on cloning was last year when Scottish scientists successfully cloned Dolly the sheep. All the pundits came out in the newspapers and tee vee and said this or that and it all went away and we forgot about it for a few months until Richard Seed, the Doctor Strangelove of Chicago, announced his intention to clone humans. Then it started in all over again with the pundits and the tee vee and even the president poked his head out and said he was opposed to research that might lead to the cloning of humans. I think we all know by now that when it comes to reproduction, the president continues to favor the old-fashioned methods, but regardless of what he or anyone else says, now that this cloning box is opened, it will be very hard to close up again.
This is true of every technology. Leo Szilard, the Hungarian physicist who was the first to imagine the terrible power that could be released by splitting the atom, helped to design the nuclear bomb and then tried to stop the government from using it. He could not.
So it is with Dolly. Now that cloning has been accomplished, it’s only a matter of time before we see more of it. All the pundits who talk about cloning talk about cloning humans. It’s an important debate and I’ll leave it to those better qualified to address it than I. There are other endpoints for cloning technology that are just as ethically dubious, and as far as I can tell, no one is talking about them.
I can see the day when a developer announces the construction of a subdivision right in the middle of prime black bear habitat. The developer announces that all the bears in the area will be killed, humanely, and a sample of genetic material from each bear will be saved so a new group of the same bears can be cloned, raised and released into another wilderness habitat, where perhaps they will be killed and cloned again.
By combining cloning with other genetic manipulation techniques, the gene pool for California Condors can be doubled or tripled without leaving the test tube.
Millionaire big game hunters will win awards from conservation foundations, because after they bagged that rare mountain goat or snow leopard, they saved some tissue so it could be recreated and put back into the wild. It adds a whole new meaning to catch and release.
I can hear new phrases coming to the debates on endangered species – congressmen will refer to salmon as “functionally extinct, but surviving as genotypes.”
While all this may amount to a huge leap forward for science, it’s also a huge leap forward in our human tendency to play God, perhaps our tendency to think we are God.
None of this has yet happened and the New England spring is lovely. We still have a few more years to watch the spring unfold of its own accord, to wait for calves and goslings to arrive as they always have. We still have a few more seasons to hope, vainly perhaps, that our wisdom will soon catch up with our cleverness.
We still don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg, but I have a good idea which will be around in the end.