Cloning: A False Sense of Security

The list of critically endangered species is complacently long. A portion of this complacency, I'd say, is assignable to the science of cloning. Ever since the Spielberg's cinematic popularising of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, we have been seduced by the theoretical possibilities of raising, Lazarus-like, dinosaurs from their immemorial death-beds.

The raising of the dead is misguidedly Christ-like and the creation-by-duplication of the living is misguidedly God-like. I would happily substitute the cliche of "we mustn't play God" with my own mantra that The further a thing is from nature, the worse it is. In this case they amount to the same thing.

Humanity creating life other than through sexual reproduction is not natural. We can conclude that it is inherently bad.

A practical - and famous - example is that of Dolly the Sheep. Dolly was a cloned sheep. She died at age six due to a pathologically accelerated aging process.

I don't understand the minutiae of the science of cloning, but I can't see how it it any different to making a colour photocopy of Starry Night. The masterpiece - mastercopy, even - would reproduce, but several times degraded.

There are three main pro- arguments of cloning that I am aware of: That of food, that of medicine, that of renaissance.

The derangement that is the science of cloning attempts subterfuge by dangerously appealing to our rationality: If we can clone food, then there will be no more famine.

As the case of Dolly suggests, the quality of the food may not be wholesome if it is pathologically aged.

Not only that, the artificial creation of flesh and crops would cause an imbalance in our planet's delicate and tenuous eco-system and food-chain.

Then there are the claims that cloning will improve medicine. That may be true, but would this method, if successful in its aim of sustaining life, not unnaturally explode the Earth's population and turn it into a planet-sized Hillsborough catastrophe?

Thirdly there is the renaissance of defunct or dead species: If we believe in the potential for recreating species, we do need to worry about extinguishing those species. As such, we'd be free to go about our daily pursuits with such abandon and disregard for the organism that subsumes us (and all other life) and worry even less (if that is possible) about the consequences of operating factories, deforestation, urbanisation etc.

We can always regenerate the species that die as collateral.

The human error is to make a half-arsed fact out of a half-baked theory. Just because time-travel is shown to be theoretically possible by Stephen Hawkin or Doctor Who, doesn't mean we need to invest our resources to make it real.

Human beings can live -and have lived - perfectly contently without experiencing a wormhole, terraforming Mars or cloning their trumped-up selves.

Ours is now the burden to live, painfully conscious of the fragility of things. To forsake this burden will be perilous.

Currently there are a group of Russian and Japanese scientists seeking to recreate the Woolly Mammoth. There is no justification for this other than a childish fantasy that is pure crazy when that childish fantasy exists in the mind of the supposed academic elite.

To reintroduce the Woolly Mammoth is to alter a fact that is millions of years old - That the animal is dead.

As well as the obvious financial gains to be made from catapulting the Woolly Mammoth from a Pleistocene tundra to a twenty-first Century zoo or incubator (or - the cruelest joke ever - from one grave to another grave set millions of years apart), at the root of it there is a human inability to accept his own mortality.

The idea of creating/recreating life serves to assuage us of the inclemency of death. And this too is monetary: Broadly speaking, those civilizations and cultures who prize material possessions fear death (as they have more lose, to judge, or more to ferry across to the other side).

I'm sure an anthropologist would confirm that the more spiritual cultures (e.g., Native Americans, Tibetans etc.) are more philosophical about the fact of death; with the opposite being true of the more material cultures - I'll never listen to my iPod again!

Whatever is the impulse to clone, we need to overcome it and recognise that the false sense of security it brings is fallacious.