American Bioethics Advisory
Commission American Bioethics Advisory
Commission A decade ago, the eminent geneticist Jerome Lejeune spoke about genetic engineering, including cloning. The following is an excerpt from his talk on genetic engineering.
Plant geneticists have discussed the cloning of man. Cloning is a very simple trick. The difficulty of choosing the parents is that even if you take one marvelous woman and one marvelous man, the children might not receive their good qualities. Cloning overcomes this problem because it produces a genetically perfect replica of the individual. You can genetically predict the results you would have because the child you will form will be as close genetically as an identical twin.
The technique used will be to choose an ovum, preferably an ovum that has just been fertilized. With a tiny pipette you suck out the legitimate nucleus, which is inside that egg. And then with another pipette you pick the nucleus of another cell from the body of another person whom you want to duplicate genetically. You take the nucleus from that person whom you want to duplicate and insert that foreign nucleus in the place of the legitimate nucleus, which you have thrown away. You can eventually get a full-grown individual having all the genetic endowment that was in the grafted nucleus. The new person will have nothing to do with the genetic or racial traits of the father and mother who donated the sperm and ovum for that original fertilized ovum, which we chose as the host for our grafted nucleus.
Another example is to take the eggs from many women so that we have millions of eggs. We could then take a million cells (that is not very many compared to the many millions in the human body) from a person, and take the nucleus out of each of those million cells. We would put each of those million nuclei into a separate egg after removing the nucleus of that egg. We could then produce a million individuals who, when implanted in the wombs of a million foster mothers, would give a million examples of this very precise genetic constitution of the donor.
What would happen if we made even a thousand clones of great men? Each of these new individuals would be endowed with the same inheritance as their ancestor. Each of them would be recognized immediately as having the talent of their ancestor. Who would get all the positions in politics or science or whatever field their ancestor came from? After a while they would produce a little bit of work, but they would then, all being identical, entirely sterilize the particular field to which they were put with a new conformism because they were all of them of the same mind and the same makeup of the mind.
That is only a mild example. Think about any name in history and try to suppose what would have happened if there had been a thousand similar people. I can think of no one in recent history so great that we would have wanted a thousand of him. Perhaps this is the reason nature was very wise in not going much farther than twins or triplets and those very rare indeed. Perhaps it is much better to make human beings one by one.
Most of this is not yet possible. The danger now is not that these things will be done but that they will be tried. Playing with human embryos has failed. It has already been tried, however, and that has decreased the respect we have for our own unborn babies. Think also of the experiments on the human fetus now routinely done in America and other countries. They are used to try drugs. Think of the women, pregnant, who will get an abortion for any reason. Some of them will receive money for taking drugs and then having the abortion. The aborted fetus will then be cut open to see what effect the drug has had.
These are a few of the foolish games we are playing with our own children, with our own flesh. It is not just foolishness, it is very precise calculation. The very same experiments could be performed on a chimpanzee fetus. They are not performed because the chimpanzee fetus costs a lot of money. Human life used to be priceless, but now we have so many human fetuses being aborted that they have no value. The cheapest thing now to experiment with is a human baby, at about one pound or less. They are the cheapest thing you can experiment on because they are thrown away.
You must realize that this is done essentially for economic reasons. It is very sad that the human brain does not cost anything today. The fetus of a chimpanzee is still respected because it costs a lot. No law has been put in by the courts to give the liberty to pregnant chimpanzees to get abortion on demand. That has been refused on the authority of the veterinarians who know that the fetus of a chimpanzee is indeed a chimpanzee.
We are now dealing with a new defamation of science. This is similar to children playing and putting on a mask over their face and then looking at each other and getting afraid. Some of today's scientists are twisting science to give science a horrible aspect. The public is getting afraid about the next discovery of science, which will spoil more and more our already partially spoiled world.
But that is not the danger. Science is a tree that bears good and bad fruit. Now we can select the fruit we wish. In America you still have a little liberty to do that. Maybe in a few years you will not have it any longer. It is time for you to understand that what is at stake is not merely the life of the baby present here and now, but rather the life of the soul of our civilization.