The Economics of Cloning

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Any normal species would be delighted at the prospect of cloning. No more nasty surprises like sickle cell or Down syndrome-just batch after batch of high-grade and, genetically speaking, immortal offspring! But representatives of the human species are responding as if someone had proposed adding Satanism to the grade-school curriculum. Suddenly, perfectly secular folks are throwing around words like sanctity and dredging up medieval-era arguments against the hubris of science. No one has proposed burning him at the stake, but the poor fellow who induced a human embryo to double itself has virtually recanted -- proclaiming his reverence for human life in a voice, this magazine reported, "choking with emotion."

There is an element of hypocrisy to much of the anticloning furor, or if not hypocrisy, superstition. The fact is we are already well down the path leading to genetic manipulation of the creepiest sort. Life-forms can be patented, which means they can be bought and sold and potentially traded on the commodities markets. Human embryos are life-forms, and there is nothing to stop anyone from marketing them now, on the same shelf with the Cabbage Patch dolls.

In fact, any culture that encourages in vitro fertilization has no right to complain about a market in embryos. The assumption behind the in vitro industry is that some people's genetic material is worth more than others' and deserves to be reproduced at any expense. Millions of low-income babies die every year from preventable ills like dysentery, while heroic efforts go into maintaining yuppie zygotes in test tubes at the unicellular stage. This is the dread "nightmare" of eugenics in familiar, marketplace form -- which involves breeding the best-paid instead of the best. Cloning technology is an almost inevitable by-product of in vitro fertilization. Once you decide to go to the trouble of in vitro, with its potentially hazardous megadoses of hormones for the female partner and various indignities for the male, you might as well make a few backup copies of any viable embryo that's produced. And once you've got the backup copies, why not keep a few in the freezer, in case Junior ever needs a new kidney or cornea?

No one much likes the idea of thawing out one of the clone kids to harvest its organs, but according to Andrew Kimbrell, author of The Human Body Shop, in the past few years an estimated 50 to 100 couples have produced babies to provide tissue for an existing child. Plus there is already a thriving market in Third World kidneys and eyes. Is growing your own really so much worse than plundering the bodies of the poor? Or maybe we'll just clone for the fun of it. If you like a movie scene, you can rewind the tape, so when Junior gets all pimply and nasty, why not start over with Junior II? Sooner or later, among the in vitro class, instant replay will be considered a human right.

The existential objections ring a bit hollow. How will it feel to be one clone among hundreds? the anticloners ask. Probably no worse than it feels to be the 3 millionth 13-year-old dressed in identical baggy trousers, untied sneakers and baseball cap -- a feeling usually described as "cool." In mass- consumer society, notions like "precious individuality" are best reserved for the Nike ads.