Remember the human cloning controversies of the early 2000s? One reason they faded was that scientists were unable to clone non-human primates. Now that researchers have produced two cloned monkeys, we should brace ourselves for a rerun of arguments in favour of human clones. But human reproductive cloning would be every bit as misguided and dangerous now as it was then.
As long ago as 1971, James Watson of double helix fame warned in about the prospect of “Moving Toward the Clonal Man”. He later changed his mind and began promoting human reproductive cloning, as well as suggesting that human germline modification could tackle stupidity and ensure all women are “pretty”.
In 1997, headlines announced that scientists in the UK had created what had long been considered biologically impossible: a cloned mammal, a sheep dubbed “Dolly”. Debate about creating human clones immediately followed. , for example, put Dolly on its cover the following month and posed the question: “Will There Ever Be Another You?”
Advertisement
A few mavericks claimed to be on the verge of producing human clones, including members of a that (still) believes humans will attain immortality by learning to clone themselves. A number of scientists and fertility doctors argued that human reproductive cloning should proceed once the safety wrinkles were worked out. In 2007, editorialised that it was inevitable.
Too dangerous
In the following years it became clear that most efforts to clone mammals failed somewhere between embryo and neonate, and that non-human primate cloning was particularly difficult. Most scientists concluded it would be far too dangerous to attempt to clone people.
In 2009, US coupled his repeal of the former administration’s restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research with a blunt assertion that human reproductive cloning is unacceptably dangerous, and also “profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society”.
Now we have two cloned macaques in China. The researchers who created them haven’t mentioned human cloning; they say cloned monkeys will be useful in biomedical investigations, particularly of genetic components of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cancer. The researchers’ failure rate remains extremely high, with two reportedly healthy offspring born from 79 implanted cloned embryos. Imagine asking women to take on those odds. And their method uses fetal cells, so it’s no good for the scenarios that human cloning advocates typically advance – replacing a dead child, creating a genetically identical “saviour sibling” for a sick brother or sister, or re-creating an or .
Most importantly, the existence of cloned monkeys doesn’t change the social and ethical case for prohibiting human reproductive cloning – as more than , including , and now do.
Unethical human experimentation
Subjecting a human to the dire risks demonstrated in animal cloning studies – including the one that produced the monkeys in China – would represent unethical human experimentation. So, too, would the psychological and emotional risks faced by a cloned child, who would live under the shadow of its genetic predecessor.
Human cloning would also pose another set of unwarranted health risks: to the many women who would be required to undergo egg extraction, and to the dozens needed as surrogates for clone pregnancies, which have .
And there are broader social and human rights considerations, too. At least since the days of Dolly, talk of human cloning has been closely linked, both technically and ideologically, to other forms of reproductive human genetic manipulation. If the cloned monkeys in China revive debate about cloned humans, echoes will reverberate in the ongoing controversy about germline editing in human reproduction.
Both procedures would risk opening the door to a world in which affluent parents design their offspring’s biology to produce purportedly superior children, thereby layering new forms of inequality and discrimination onto existing disparities and injustice that are already obscenely vast. There is no justifiable reason for taking such risks.
Read more: Scientists have cloned monkeys and it could help treat cancer; Cloned monkey embryos are a “gallery of horrors”; Instant Expert: Cloning
