The Economics of Cloning

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Besides, if we truly believed in the absolute uniqueness of each individual, there would be none of this unseemly eagerness to reproduce one's own particular genome. What is it, after all, that drives people to in vitro rather than adoption? Deep down, we don't want to believe we are each unique, one-time-only events in the universe. We hope to happen again and again. And when the technology arrives for cloning adult individuals, genetic immortality should be within reach of the average multimillionaire. Ross Perot will be followed by a flock of little re-Rosses.

As for the argument that the clones will be subpeople, existing to gratify % the vanity of their parents (or their "originals," as the case may be), since when has it been illegal to use one person as a vehicle for the ambitions of another? If we don't yet breed children for their SAT scores, there is a whole class of people, heavily overlapping with the in vitro class, who coach their toddlers to get into the nursery schools that offer a fast track to Harvard. You don't have to have been born in a test tube to be an extension of someone else's ego.

For that matter, if we get serious about the priceless uniqueness of each individual, many venerable social practices will have to go. It's hard to see why people should be able to sell their labor, for example, but not their embryos or eggs. Labor is also made out of the precious stuff of life -- energy and cognition and so forth -- which is hardly honored when "unique individuals" by the millions are condemned to mind-killing, repetitive work.

The critics of cloning say we should know what we're getting into, with all its Orwellian implications. But if we decide to outlaw cloning, we should understand the implications of that. We would be saying in effect that we prefer to leave genetic destiny to the crap shooting of nature, despite sickle-cell anemia and Tay-Sachs and all the rest, because ultimately we don't trust the market to regulate life itself. And this may be the hardest thing of all to acknowledge: that it isn't so much 21st century technology we fear, as what will happen to that technology in the hands of old-fashioned 20th century capitalism.