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We do not need to speculate about the motives of the Raelians
in pursuing their cloning agenda, claiming to have achieved
a successful clone, or naming her "Eve." They are
vigorous self-publicists; they demonstrate the well-known fact
that clever people can hold crazy beliefs; and they seem to
enjoy teasing the world's press as much as the world's press
likes selling their teasing headlines.
But "Eve" is interesting. In Genesis, it is said that
Eve is given her name because it signifies that she is "the
mother of all living." Eve the clone, if clone she be,
is surely the mother of all manufactured, the epitome of the
ambiguities built into the cloning worldview.
Most of us are against cloning but somewhat ambivalent about
clones. Those who saw the movie The Sixth Day, with a title
also culled from the book of Genesis, gained a perspective on
one likely future (routine cloning of pets) and one less likely
(a judicial decision to kill successfully cloned persons).
Perhaps the most ambivalent of us would seem to be Senator Orrin
Hatch, with his strange theory that clonal human beings are
not the same as regular human beings, and may not be really
"human" at all in the way the rest of us are. It is
a strange and highly dangerous belief, and it is caused, logically,
by his conflicting desires to preserve his pro-life credentials
and buy the bio-ethics line that experimental embryo cloning
is a good thing. It is a deadly combination.
Eve is probably a con, and the same is also true for Dr. Antinori's
claimed clonal pregnancy and any others that are floating around.
If one of these turns out to be right, the heavy hitters of
the embryology world will need to eat their hats. They have
been saying that it would be extraordinarily difficult to clone
a healthy baby. By the same token, investors in Advanced Cell
Technologies, the Massachusetts biotech start-up that claimed
in November 2001 to have successfully cloned human embryos (they
died very soon after the first cell divisions; it was all hyped)
will want their money back.
But there will, we may soberly reflect, be an Eve sooner or
later, and she will stand in human history as the mother of
all manufactured, the product of the triumph of the human mind
and its technological capacities over the sexual procreativity
that lies so close to the heart of the human experience. What
shall we do with her?
First, of course, we shall need to protect her from the likes
of Senator Hatch. For a clonal child is surely a child. When
people ask, "Does a clone have a soul?" that is their
question: Is this another one of us, however strange her origins,
or is she something other? Does her status as manufactured human
deny her being human at all? It is not difficult to repudiate
the Hatch Hypothesis on the simple ground that in every way
a clonal embryo is indistinguishable from an embryo conceived
naturally or through in vitro techniques. If that is true of
the embryo, it remains true of the baby and the child and adult.
She is of our species, located as surely as you and I in the
great genealogy though, as we know, her birth mother is her
twin sister, her birth father her brother-in-law, and her birth
mother's parents her parents also. Cloning commodifies by treating
persons like things; it does not make them into things. So Eve
will need to be welcomed as a member of the human community,
damaged though her psyche will be and weird though her family
relationships will be.
This second Eve will be one of us. The second Adam, the Scriptures
teach, came to rescue us. The second Eve will surely lead us
more deeply into the mire, as the bright line that separates
persons and projects is erased and we are taken one decisive
step closer to the true designer baby (with genetic modifications
built in as features), and to the melding of human and machine
(mecha and orga, as Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence
designated them) in "technosapiens" and a human-robotic
future.
Eve was the mother of all living. The Raelians have made a clever
point with their reference to Genesis chapter 2. But they have
not read on into chapter 3. It was also she who passed the fruit
to Adam, her husband, "and he did eat." She takes
on the role of temptress, offering a choice that Adam should
never have had to face. Eve II, without a doubt, will do likewise.
She will serve as temptress, beguiling us with biotech's promise
and its capacity to give us choices we have never before had.
She will be the mother of all commodification.
Nigel Cameron is
Ethics and Policy Consultant to CARE and General Editor of
CounterCulture
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