There is some evidence that certain behavioral traits are likely to be inherited, and perhaps some psychological dimensions. But I think people have the wrong idea. Part of the problem with cloning is that there is so much in our experience that makes a difference. I'm in Chicago and here everyone wants to clone Michael Jordan, but the kind of experience that he had, like not being able to play on the team earlier in high school, is unlikely to happen to his clone. Pity the 10-year-old clone of Michael Jordan who breaks his knee -- he might think he's worthless and so might his parents, especially since people are paying big money for "smart sperm."

I'm also troubled by the fact that if we clone Michael Jordan, if the original Michael Jordan dies early, in middle age, of an inheritable cancer, his clone as a young child would become uninsurable. Once we learn genetic information about the original, we might discriminate against the clone in employment, insurance and education. My main concern is that it will create what one lawyer has called a "genetic bondage." If you clone a dead child you would expect -- which is the only reason you're doing it instead of having another one -- to re-create the first one. What if you clone a famous musician and the child wants to do horseback riding or baseball. In normal life, a parent would give up if the child wasn't really interested or seems to be tone deaf, but if you have chosen or bought the genetic material from someone with a particular trait, I think there will be a lot of pressure for the child to follow in the famous progenitor's footsteps.

In your book, it says that legally there is nothing to stop another person from cloning you, and that they can do it from something as seemingly harmless as a hair.

You can get DNA from a hair follicle, they do it for forensic testing. And you could clone someone from it. Part of the reason that we're poorly protected is that there is a decision in the California Supreme Court in which a doctor patented a cell line made out of the patient's material (cells) and the court said the patient has no property rights in his cells, but that the doctor can have property rights. I think now that we can clone, now that we can do all these things with people's genetic materials outside their bodies, I think we need more rules about control.

And also, it's a huge mess when it comes to inheritance law and family law. Who is the legal parent if a wealthy individual like Bill Gates clones himself? Traditional paternity testing would suggest that his parents should be the legal parents since he's created a brother, a twin. And yet the egg donor in the cloning situation (there is a tiny bit of DNA that's still in the egg) might have rights. And in several states, if the clone were just gestated by a surrogate, the child is the legal offspring of the surrogate and her husband.

Do you think there should be some international body convened right now before all of this goes any further?

I think it would be a terrific idea to look at it at the international level. We've seen that once Australia clamped down on what you could do with in vitro, people went to Singapore. When Dr. Richard Seed, a veterinarian, was proposing human cloning and was going to do it in Illinois, the legislature made noises like it was going to ban it, and he said he would do it in Mexico. This is a much more difficult industry to regulate than the nuclear power industry because it doesn't take that much equipment and it isn't that expensive. In cloning, you take a cell from any part of the body, like the skin or the cheek or a hair follicle, and you take the DNA out of that cell. Then you put it in an egg from which the DNA has been removed. They make the embryo out of the skin cells, the egg is only there as a kind of incubator, and no sperm is used.

In your book you mention a lot about all these human embryos that are frozen and abandoned. Is this becoming a huge problem?

There are maybe 15,000 women who get pregnant each year through in vitro fertilization, but there are another 20,000 that are frozen each year. So there are a lot of questions about these "souls on ice," which currently number 150,000. For example, who gets custody in a divorce? There have already been cases about the husband not wanting the ex-wife to use the embryos, but she's gone through all the expense and physical risk of undergoing in vitro and she still wants to have a child. We have a whole set of questions about whether or not the embryos should be considered people, property or just medical waste. In one case I was involved in, a couple had an embryo frozen in a Virginia clinic and then they moved to Los Angeles and wanted to have the embryo implanted there. The clinic didn't want to give it to them. The couple said it was similar to giving your car to a parking garage and getting it back, which they ultimately did.

And now other states have taken the approach that in vitro embryos should be considered more like people. Louisiana has a law saying embryos are juridical or persons and cannot be terminated. And so if a couple has twins or triplets on their first attempt and doesn't want to use the rest of their frozen embryos, apparently the state government can swoop in and give them to other couples . And yet, the original parents might worry, is the child lonely, sad, mistreated?

There are also problems down that route. Since in vitro fertilization in general only has a 25 percent success rate, if you consider the embryo a person, doctors might be accused of homicide for the other 75 percent of embryos; or women might not be allowed to abort if we start thinking of embryos as people. The U.K., on the other hand, says after five years, if the couples haven't used it or claimed it, [the embryo] must be destroyed.

What is the big question that we should be asking ourselves as we march down this scientific path?

The big question is: What kind of society do we want to be in? Do we want to be in one where everything is for sale, including genetic traits, do we want to have low tolerance for any departure from some standard ideal?

It's such a new technology that we don't know how it's going to happen. It took two generations to figure out the risk of DES [the drug given to women during pregnancy, which caused problems in their offspring]. I would like to see, at the very least, some follow-up data across the board on how these children and women are faring because they're being given high doses of hormones and these fertility drugs. There was some indication that they were at increased risk for ovarian cancer, but we still need more studies.

Do you think that these doctors who are working in the reproductive field are playing God?

Yes, I do think that they are creating life. And so there are responsibilities that go along with it. I think they would respond by saying medicine in general plays God -- even giving insulin to a diabetic, or glasses to someone who is near-sighted, makes a change of nature -- but I think that one thing that is happening is the changes are so great and so fundamental that society might not be in agreement with them. We might feel kindly toward glasses but we might not feel kindly toward aborting a child with a minor disability. It shouldn't be up to individual doctors to decide if they want to clone or not, or decide whether they want to take sperm from a dead man or what the age cutoff is for in vitro (some physicians don't provide the egg donations to women past menopause, others do). If we're going to make fundamental changes around the creation of life, we need a wider social discussion about it. That was in part what I was hoping to do with this book.
salon.com | May 3, 1999

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