The merits of cloning

(Due to an editorial error, Mike Kimberly's column was not printed in its entirety. This column includes his additions)

In a recent column for The Daily Princetonian responding to President Bush's speech on cloning, Dave Sillers suggested that creating life with the express purpose of destroying it is wrong. In the context of medical applications of cloning technology, this means that the generation of vital and genetically-compatible organs is unjustified because a "human life" is created for the express purpose of its own destruction. But objectors, Mr. Bush and Mr. Sillers included, miss the point entirely. A liver generated in a biotech lab, even one embedded in a more complex biological apparatus, would be no more a sanctified "human life" than a person's recently removed tumor. It would not be a person, it would just be tissue. A tumor, just like a liver, is neither conscious, nor feeling of pain, nor self-sufficient. Certainly Mr. Sillers does not mean that life generally cannot be created for the purpose of destruction, because most of us eat meat from cows slaughtered in animal factories. Why then the fuss?

As I suggested in my own column, all we have left to conclude is that Mr. Sillers, along side President Bush, believes that cloning is unethical because it is repugnant, because it does not "feel right." Mr. Sillers offers the typical slippery-slope argument, that cloning will lead to "a brave new world" of cloned slaves and Hitler-like dictators. To the contrary, acting upon the whims of our visceral compulsions leads us down a more dangerous and more probable slippery slope than any Huxley novel; the Tuskegee trials are enough evidence of that. Meanwhile, in vitro fertilization has not lead to the commodification of "unnatural" babies, as the conservatives cried in 1978, any more than cloning will lead to armies of enslaved clones at the hands of fascist dictators (if for no other reason than that it will simply be too expensive).

Mr. Sillers also argued that reproductive cloning is a form of "biological coersion," confining cloned babies to "destinies already lived." But as my own experience as an identicle twin evinces, individuality is not solely the product of one's genes, if it is at all. My brother and I, who have grown up in more similar environments than any clone of an older person will ever be able to claim, are distinct and different individuals. A person's delayed genetic twin, who will develop subject to vastly different environmental stimuli — different parents, different friends, different schools — will be even more different from her twin than natural twins are from each other. She will not be living a destiny that has already been decided in any more a meaningful way than any son or daughter is subject to the vicarious direction of her parents.

Before anyone else condemns cloning for being repugnant, or for undoubtedly leading us down an Orwellian slippery slope, or for compromising identity, or for offending "human dignity," I urge everyone to review precedent. Twins' individualities are not compromised, and IVF, for which all of the same arguments were made 20 years ago, has lead to nothing but happy families. Michael Kimberly is an independent major in bioethics from Birmingham, Ala. He can be reached at kimberly@princeton.edu.