Alexander Chancellor in London
I CANNOT quite decide how worried to be about this cloning business. Since some scientists in Scotland announced recently that they had created an exact copy of a sheep from one cell in its udder, the British newspapers have been full of what they like to call “chilling prospects”. The Times of London was perhaps the most sensational. It attached great weight to the opinions of Dr Patrick Dixon, author of a book called The Genetic Revolution, who forecast that cloning would soon be possible with humans.
Dixon listed four categories of persons who might want to clone themselves. These were: people with serious illnesses requiring “spare part” transplants; “dictators who wish to produce carbon copies of themselves”; parents wanting a spare baby in case an existing one suffered a cot death; and “entertainment moguls wanting to recreate dead stars”.
I read this several times before concluding that The Times and Dixon were being serious. But it was quite obvious that they were talking rubbish. Take dictators, for example. Why should dictators “wish to produce carbon copies of themselves”? Dictators normally pride themselves on their uniqueness. The last thing they want is another identical would-be dictator on the scene.
And what is there to guarantee that clones of dictators would automatically turn out to be as vicious and power-crazed as the original articles? In Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Adolf Hitler (Adenoid Hynkel in the film) has an exact lookalike, a Jewish barber, who feels nothing but love for his fellow men.
This might happen in real life. What if a clone of Hitler, instead of being the son of an impecunious, thrice-married customs officer called Schicklgruber in turn-of- the-century Austria, were brought up by nice people in a nice suburb? Instead of murdering six million Jews, he might become a well-meaning schoolmaster or social worker. Genetics are not everything, you know.
Dixon’s other examples of would-be cloners are no less perplexing. I do not understand why clones of people with serious illnesses would not have the same serious illnesses themselves. But assuming that they would not, what kind of a monster is it who would require of a perfectly nice identical person that he part with one of his internal organs on demand? Why is it assumed that the clone has a lesser right to his own internal organs than the lookalike who preceded him?
If I were a clone, I would – rather than watch myself being dismantled bit by bit – resist such demands by force. I might even treat myself to one of the other person’s organs from time to time as a gesture of independence.
An even more “chilling prospect”, according to Dixon, is that of parents manufacturing spare babies to replace ones removed by cot deaths. This sounds like an invitation to child murder, of which there is far too much already. Child murderers could produce as many identical babies as they wanted and smother them one after another. There would always be a spare one to show the policeman or social worker when they came around.
Then there is Dr Dixon’s extraordinary image of “entertainment moguls wanting to recreate dead stars”. Why should they want to do that? If a new little Humphrey Bogart were brought into the world today, we would have to wait until more than a quarter of the way through the next century before he would be old enough to say “Here’s looking at you, kid” in a plausible manner. I suppose that cloning might mean that Cliff Richard actually would live for ever, rather than just pretend he is going to. And it might be possible to re-form the Beatles if one could find a living John Lennon cell. But on the whole, I fail to see the point.
Of what use, then, might cloning be?