Your book hinges on the idea that human cloning will become common, guided by
market forces and unhindered by legal issues. What led you to this
conclusion?
The way Americans have used reproductive technologies in the past. For-profit
clinics have popped up around the country that are willing to offer any kind of
services that infertile couples desire, if they are prepared to pay for them. I
don鈥檛 think that cloning will ever be common, in the same way that in vitro
fertilisation is not common. But I think it will eventually be accepted and used
by a small minority of people in special circumstances.
What about people who say that you should stop cloning with laws? For
example, Britain has banned human cloning since 1990.
Advertisement
Human cloning will not harm people if couples use it to have children that
they鈥檙e going to love, and the children are healthy. Many Americans would see
laws banning cloning as irrational, and they would try to get around them, in
the same way that British women come to America right now to buy human eggs
because they can鈥檛 buy them in Britain.
Your most controversial claim is that genetic engineering will ultimately
lead to two or more human species that would not be able to interbreed. Do you
really believe this? Why exactly is this going to happen?
Two species could arise in the distant future. I believe this could happen
because genetic engineering of embryos is inevitable. I can see ways in which
genetic engineering will be made safe and efficient, and there will be a market
for it鈥攑arents who want to give their children advantages in life.
Already, the children of people who have money get advantages, environmental
advantages鈥攖hey get better educations, they get better health services,
they get computers on their desks to play with. The huge gap between the rich
and the poor shows itself in what parents can do for their children. I see that
continuing and becoming more pronounced in the future, and extending into the
genetic realm.
I really do believe that genetic enhancements will accumulate over the years,
and that that could inadvertently create humans who could not interbreed.
Do you think parents will deliberately do this to stop their kids sullying
the designer genes they have invested in?
One can imagine several different ways in which genetic engineering could be
used to initiate speciation on purpose. For example, people could give their
children altered sperm-egg binding molecules to prevent them breeding with other
people. If we look at the worst examples of ethnic conflict that still plague
the Earth, we can surely find examples of people who might do this. If we allow
our minds to roam freely, and take off from the worst of human instincts, I
don鈥檛 think we can rule out purposeful speciation.
Would it be such a bad thing, to have multiple human species?
The notion that the upper and the lower classes will become further and
further apart until they separate into different species I think would be the
most horrible thing that ever happened to humanity. It would give those who were
genetically enhanced a rationale for severe discrimination against those who
were not. The enhanced would treat the unenhanced the same way we treat other
species right now. We treat human beings as equals, but we put other highly
intelligent primates, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, into zoos and cages.
With cloning, women will no longer need men to reproduce. What effect will
cloning have on sex as we know it today? Could we end up with only one sex?
I doubt it. Most women I know like having sex with men, and I don鈥檛 think
that will ever change. I think it鈥檚 important to distinguish the science-fiction
scenarios from reality. The science-fiction scenarios are little armies of
Hitlers running around. But governments are not going to clone people.
Governments do not reproduce. People reproduce, and we have to get back to a
basic biological fact, which is that people want to have children to raise and
to love. This is part of our nature. Governments have never produced children,
and I don鈥檛 think that they ever will. Is it possible that an all-women society
could go off and establish itself on other worlds? Yes, but I don鈥檛 see it
happening on Earth.
How well do you think scientists are addressing the implications of cloning?
Are they being honest with the public?
There are a lot of scientists who are perplexed by the public outcry, but
they are afraid of public opinion. They don鈥檛 want to confront this outcry and
say: 鈥淵ou don鈥檛 know what you鈥檙e talking about, you鈥檙e wrong.鈥� There could be a
backlash that would make it more difficult for them to conduct their research.
Whether or not they think human cloning is bad, it is easy to condemn it when a
ban would have no effect on their own research.
In your book, you mention that in casual conversation with people at IVF
clinics, they said they were anxious to move forward with cloning selected
patients. When could this happen?
It鈥檚 going to take some time. Nobody in their right mind would think about
cloning a human being today. I think what those people are doing, quietly, is
trying to get cell fusion to work with human oocytes and somatic cells, trying
to get the initial embryonic divisions to take place, and that鈥檚 perfectly legal
in the US at this point in time. Ultimately, I think a safe method could be
perfected. But they are going to have to wait for many monkeys to be born
without birth defects before they attempt it in humans.
Your book makes such extraordinary predictions that some people might accuse
you of scaremongering. How do you feel about that?
I鈥檓 not suggesting that the most outrageous things are going to happen
tomorrow, or even during our lifetime. I鈥檓 suggesting that they鈥檒l happen if we
take the science we know today and just naturally follow it forward. Each
individual use of the technology could be justified by the fact that the parents
love their children and the children are happy and healthy. It鈥檚 only when the
individual cases are accumulated over many generations that it could have such a
dramatic, unintended, long-term effect.