Why not clone? Nature does it all the time
Published on Sunday, March 28th 1999 on The San Juan StarSociety has always had a love-hate relationship with science. In times past, it was more hate than love. Two classic examples are Galileo and Darwin. Galileo was excommunicated by the Catholic Church for postulating that the earth was not the center of the universe. Darwin was a pariah for postulating that creation did not take place on a case-by-case basis, but rather, as Divine Intelligence would have it, in a flowing sequence of events where the apt survived and the inept were eliminated. Though both Galileo and Darwin were later exonerated by the Church, even today society is against evolution. The Endangered Species Act forbids that species become extinct. If that alone isn't sublime presumptuousness, I don't know what is.
Whenever science learns to manipulate nature, society becomes indignant. Society has forgotten the biblical mandate in Genesis 1: 27-30, where God orders man to rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and over every living creature. Society has objected to test-tube babies. Some religions object to antibiotics, injections and surgery. Why not transplant organs? Why not repair a cleft lip and palate? Why not replace a faulty heart valve? Did you know that faulty human heart valves are replaced with valves from pigs? Now the objection is against cloning. Why not clone? Nature does it all the time!
A coral is a clone. Jellyfish clone. Sea anemones clone. Any organism that reproduces while in a larval stage, like Bilharzia, is a clone. Sea squirts (also called tunicates) clone. Break up a starfish and each piece regenerates into starfish clones. Any plant that reproduces by budding is a clone. Your whole front lawn could be a clone. A stand of bamboo could be a clone. God is not against cloning! God makes clones!
Cloning is the reproduction, without sex, of any organism. The absence of sex –and there are thousands of organisms in nature that reproduce without it– only precludes the exchange of genetic material. Therefore, clones have the same genes. Clones are identical twins. Yes, identical twins are a clone! Every cell in your body has a copy of your master plan. Every cell, be it liver, kidney or lung, has all your genes: your genome. Therefore, theoretically, any cell in your body can make a whole new you. We have cloned cows and sheep. We can do it in any organism from which we can pull the nucleus out of an egg and implant a nucleus from another body cell. It has not yet been done in humans, but it will someday.
There is nothing wrong with cloning. Those who fear cloning probably remember the movie The Boys from Brazil, in which some bad guys were cloned to be bad guys. It doesn't have to be that way. In fact, it is improbable that cloned individuals will ever behave the same. If I were cloned, my clone would not turn sixty three when my nucleus gets implanted into an egg cell. No, my clone would develop as an embryo, then as a baby, then as a teenager, and it would turn sixty three 63 years later. And my clone would become educated in its day and age and adopt the customs of its time, not of mine. My clone will be very different from me.
I'm sure nobody would want to clone Adolf Hitler, although his clone of today will have nothing to do with Nazism or the Holocaust. Yet society may well want to clone the da Vincis, the Mother Theresas and the Einsteins of this world. After all, we can be very subjective with our prejudices.
Some day we will clone for organ transplants. We will develop transgenic lines of sheep and pigs just for their organs. Many people today are waiting in line for an organ. They must meet stringent qualifications just to get in line. Then they wait for a donor. And wait again. What if we were to breed organisms whose genes were compatible with ours –like we have compatible blood types for transfusions– just for organ transplants? It is called xenotransplantation, or transplants from a foreign organism. Don't laugh. It's been done! The problem is that society is still against science, and some of these things are not advertised.
Let's say that a San Juan patient who qualified as a potential recipient is waiting for a heart, or a kidney. A young man dies in a car wreck in San Francisco, and his tissues match the San Juan patient. Too bad. Can't have it. The organ is more than four hours away. It won't make it from San Francisco to San Juan in time. But if you had the organ in a live pig, you could send the pig by boat and the organ would still be alive when it got here. This will happen!
Now politicians and other sectors of society are against cloning. But no amount of legislation will forbid cloning, like no amount of legislation will forbid travel to the moon. Both are attractive scientific possibilities that could be very beneficial to mankind.
Cloning is the exact opposite of the Draft. Back in the old days, we enrolled in the Selective Service System as we turned eighteen, underwent a physical exam, and if found to be top notch human specimens –what they called 1-A– we were sent to battle to get wiped out. If we were found unfit –what they called 4-F– we could stay home, mate and reproduce. It was the opposite of Darwinism. It was selection of the unfit.
Cloning will select the 1-A's to be perpetuated. Let it be.