The Week/The Clones

This week a Scottish scientist confirmed that he had cloned an adult sheep. He insisted his only goal was to improve sheeps' milk—pretty much the level of imagination you'd expect from a guy who wrote his doctoral thesis on the freezing of boar semen. Nevertheless, the news has inspired journalists, pundits, politicians, and ordinary citizens to propose far more radical applications. Here is a roundup, starting with the most mundane.

1. Animals as drug factories. Cattle would be genetically engineered and then cloned to produce drugs to treat human diseases. The drugs would appear in the animals' milk, and who knows what else. The engineering part of this is well underway; the cloning might take just a couple of years.

2. Animals as food and clothing factories. Meatier pigs, woollier sheep, cows that give more milk. Farmers have been doing this forever through selective breeding. And "forever" is how long selective breeding takes. But once we know the right genes and how to clone the animals, we can mass-produce the perfect pig immediately. No more screwing around. The catch: Uniformity is a weakness. If every pig has the same genes, one virus can wipe them all out. And if we miss a good gene, we might inadvertently clone it out of existence.

3. "Natural" health food. This combines ideas No. 1 and No. 2. We could manufacture pigs with less fat, cows that make low-fat milk, and chickens that lay low-cholesterol eggs.

4. Animal eugenics. This is like the preceding ideas, except that it aims for physical perfection beyond utility. Horse racing is the obvious example. The popular fantasy is that cloning will reduce this to a contest of genetic manipulation (as though it weren't already). Experts note that the opposite is true: Once the perfect horse is cloned, the race boils down to how each clone is raised and ridden.

5. Animal experiments. Cloning allows these experiments to be perfectly controlled, by ruling out genetic differences that might cause the animals' responses to vary. One idea is to produce identical animals, give them an environmental disease (say, AIDS), and test various treatments on them. Another is to clone an animal that already has a genetic disease, then test therapies on the copies. Identical sheep with cystic fibrosis seem to be a common fantasy. It's so much easier to manufacture wheezing sheep than to find them. And if you don't have a wheezing sheep, you can make one by inserting the bad gene into an embryo, and then clone it. Animal rights advocates, and even normal people, find all this horribly cruel. But defenders point out that since cloning reduces the chance of experimental error by eliminating genetic variation, we wouldn't need as many test animals.

6. Animal-human transplants. This is a short step from No. 1. Instead of engineering a pig to produce drugs that will fortify your liver, we'll engineer a pig whose liver can be "harvested" to replace yours. This requires fiddling with the pig's proteins so your body won't reject its liver. Four companies are working on this. Enhanced pig organs have already been transplanted into primates.

7. Saving endangered species. Kids love this idea. Adults, too: No more guilt over cutting down forests full of spotted owls.

8. Resurrecting extinct species. This is a short step from No. 7. For years, scientists thought adult DNA was too degraded to yield a successful clone. Now that they've been proven wrong, they're saying DNA from a dead cell is too degraded. Or at least that the dead tissue would have to have been frozen. We know where this is going. Requisite literary allusion: Jurassic Park.

9. Preserving and resurrecting pets. This is a short step from ideas No. 7 and No. 8. It's just more personal. You can't stand to let Rover go. And thanks to cloning, you won't have to.

10. Human fertility. Say a couple wants kids, but the husband finds out he's sterile. Their doctor offers to remove an egg from the wife, fertilize it by replacing its contents with the husband's DNA (taken from a blood cell instead of a sperm cell), and return it to the wife's womb, where it will grow into a healthy baby. Otherwise, the couple will never be able to have a child related to either of them. Would you permit them this one chance at happiness? Congratulations. You've just authorized human cloning.

Or consider a lesbian couple who can have either (a) a child genetically copied from one partner (through cloning), (b) a child genetically unrelated to either partner (through adoption), or (c) a child genetically copied half from one partner and half from a male third party whom the child perhaps will never know (through the traditional technique). Should (a) be illegal while (b) and (c) are legal?

Some analysts have observed that sexual orientation notwithstanding, this practice would render men superfluous to the replenishment of the human race. Pundits are divided as to whether this would be (a) an offense against God and nature or (b) the greatest thing since mammograms.

11. Preventing genetic diseases. This scenario is similar to the one described under idea No. 10. A woman has a catastrophic genetic defect. Should she be permitted to bear a child using only her husband's DNA? Or should the law forbid that—while allowing her to produce, by natural means, a doomed child?

12. Cloning human organs. This is a more advanced version of idea No. 6. Instead of stealing a pig's liver, you clone your own. When your old liver stops working, you have it replaced with the healthy, cloned liver. The pig is relieved.

13. Human eugenics. This combines ideas No. 4 and No. 11. Giving your daughter lungs free of cystic fibrosis is good. Giving her the lungs of a diva or a champion swimmer is better. Even now, using in vitro fertilization, doctors routinely create multiple embryos from a couple's DNA and implant the ones that look strongest. Cloning would allow the production of many more embryos. Doctors could then try to fix or improve certain genes in each embryo, and implant the embryo in which the "operation" seems to have worked best.

14. Preserving and resurrecting family members. This is an extension of idea No. 9. The commonly discussed scenario involves a dying newborn whose parents, by cloning the child, can essentially turn back the clock nine months and give the child a second chance at life. The next question is whether you'd grant the same second chance to a one-year-old, a two-year-old, etc. Or whether you'd forbid cloning a newborn just because it stopped breathing moments before doctors could begin the cloning process. Eventually this line of questioning gets around to bringing back Grandpa. Requisite literary allusion: Frankenstein.

15. Self-replication for its own sake. This is like idea No. 10, except that your motive isn't infertility. You just love yourself so much, or crave immortality so desperately, that you insist on creating a new person, or maybe a whole bunch of people, exactly like you. Pundits and average citizens agree on the script: A rich egomaniac evades anti-cloning laws by hiring a black-market lab on a tropical island, the same way he'd skirt taxes by using a bank in the Bahamas. Requisite literary allusions: Future Shock and In His Own Image, a 1978 novel (purporting to be a true story) about a billionaire's attempt to clone himself.

Analysts see two problems with this idea. Problem No. 1: Rich egomaniacs are the last people the world needs more of. Among those singled out by the media: Dennis Rodman, Donald Trump, Madonna, Lee Kwan Yew, and Newt Gingrich, whose spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal she'd like to put a clone of Newt "in each family's home." (Bill Gates told the Journal he didn't want to be cloned because it would violate "the uniqueness of the individual.")

Problem No. 2 is that your clone would share your genes but would grow up with separate environmental inputs and would therefore turn out different from you. On the bright side, this solves problem No. 1.

16. Replicating living or dead geniuses. This combines ideas No. 13 and No. 14. The Chicago Tribune points out that a sperm bank is already selling the semen of Nobel laureates. Popular nominees for cloning: Jesus, Mozart, Lincoln, Einstein, John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley, and Michael Jordan. All you'd need from the dead ones, theoretically, is a bit of old bone or dried blood. Requisite literary allusions: Sleeper (the Woody Allen movie in which a great leader's nose is preserved so he can be cloned back to life) and Joshua, Son of None (a book in which Kennedy is cloned).

The problems here are the same as before. Problem No. 1: An evil genius can be cloned just as easily as a good one. Experts figure that since cloning a genius is madness, madmen and their followers are the people most likely to try it. Hitler is the obvious candidate. Requisite literary allusion: The Boys From Brazil. Problem No. 2: Genes alone won't reproduce the genius. Without the Civil War, Lincoln won't be Lincoln. Without the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy won't be Kennedy. But again, problem No. 2 solves problem No. 1. "A cloned Hitler, for example, might turn out to be a philanthropist," the Tribune suggests cheerfully.

17. Human-human transplants. This combines ideas No. 6 and No. 12. Who knows what organ or limb you'll need to replace as you grow older? The simplest solution is to clone your whole body. Ethicists note that some parents of kids who needed bone marrow transplants have conceived new children in the hope that the second child can donate marrow to the first. The "donor," of course, is below the age of consent. And a clone's organs are even better than a sibling's, since they're guaranteed to match the recipient genetically. As with idea No. 15, the best arrangement is to have your clone grown and frozen in a black-market lab on a tropical island. Whatever you need—perhaps a new spleen or pancreas—will always be handy. Requisite literary allusion: Dorian Gray.

18. Multi-tasking. If you'd rather not stand in line, show up for work, or serve your time in jail, send your clone instead. Requisite allusion: Multiplicity, the movie in which Michael Keaton clones himself so he can handle simultaneous obligations. One little boy interviewed this week suggested this would be a great way of creating a decoy if you're a spy or a soldier.

19. Cloning slaves. Some writers have suggested this, but it makes no sense. Who needs cloning? The old-fashioned ways of acquiring slaves are easier: Buy them, subjugate free people, or have kids.

20. Cloning sex objects. This makes more sense. Once you know what you like in a hunk or babe, why put up with imperfections? Perhaps you're reluctant to dump your spouse. If so, an average guy interviewed by the Tribune offers a compromise: Clone your wife, and re-experience the younger version.