Monkeying Around with the Self.

• Author: Young, Cathy

Why support for biotech shouldn't foreclose the debate over its moral issues.

By now, the script is predictable. A new breakthrough in biotechnology, actual or only planned, is announced and breathlessly hyped in the media; pundits left and right respond with variations on the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it theme; libertarians blast those who would restrict progress in the name of authoritarian moralism and fear. But perhaps no one is entirely right. The shrill, mindless alarmism could inhibit important scientific advances; yet there is danger, too, in cavalier dismissal of moral concerns about how the quest to control our genetic destiny may affect humanity's basic view of itself.

The latest round in this debate was set off by two stories in the first month of 2001: the revelation that scientists at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center had bred the first genetically altered primate--ANDi ("inserted DNA" spelled backwards), a rhesus monkey with an added jellyfish gene--and the news that an American physiologist and an Italian fertility expert would attempt to clone a human being. "Creeping toward us...is perhaps the gravest imaginable crisis, one that could result in the end of history as a distinctively human, and humane, story," prophesied George Will in a January 21 column. Once genetic engineering is perfected in simians, he warned, human designer babies are next--and ultimately nothing less than "the abolition of humanity."

Just a few years ago, it was the sheep that could mean the end--Dolly the First Cloned Mammal, whose arrival sparked a hysteria-tinged debate riddled with misconceptions about cloning. Some scenarios came straight out of third-rate sci-fi movies: for instance, tyrants with armies of obedient clones. Actually, as psychologist Terrence Hines pointed out in The Skeptical Inquirer, clones are not drones, and cloning "would be an astonishingly costly and inefficient way of getting an army." It would make much more sense to grab children born the old-fashioned way and start instilling mindless obedience at an early age, as some real-life tyrants have done.

Fantastic visions of clone armies and clone slaves were invoked not only on conspiracy Web sites but in Time and U.S. News & World Report. In The New Republic, University of Chicago bioethicist Leon Kass wrote that "it is not at all clear to what extent a clone will truly be a moral agent," since his autonomy would be subverted by "the very fact of cloning, and...