At the time, everyone concerned assured anyone who would listen that using this technology on humans was not the point and would be wrong. That turns out to be not entirely the case. Cloning humans in order to make walking, talking people is still disliked by many and is not a major feature of most research agendas (though there are various people offering to do it). Using cloning technology for medical purposes, however, looks increasingly likely, and steps toward it could start this year. The distinction between these two things says a lot about changing attitudes toward the manipulation of nature.
A large part of the distinction comes from the belief that there are conditions in which allowing a fertilized egg to develop into a baby is wrong, but having created that fertilized egg in the first place was right. To many, and especially to quite a few people with political influence in America, this seems evil. In the United Kingdom, though, it has been accepted as part of the country’s pioneering development of fertility treatments. The U.K.’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the first such body set up anywhere in the world, was conceived in the late 1980s precisely to deal with decisions about when it was proper to make embryos that would never be babies.
Now the HFEA, in concert with the government’s Human Genetic Advisory Committee (HGAC), has suggested that the conditions under which it can license research that involves destroying embryos be extended. The original deal was that embryos could be created and destroyed only in attempts to improve people’s fertility. This was not an entirely rational position, placing reproduction above all other possible benefits, but perhaps for simple reasons of symmetry it seems to sit quite easily in the public’s moral framework. Now the authority is suggesting its powers might be broadened so it could license embryo research as a step toward creating cells that could be used to repair the tissues of people already alive.
That this is possible in principle has been pretty obvious to scientists since about a day after Dolly shot to stardom; recent progress in the field of “stem cells” derived from embryos and capable of being turned into all kinds of tissue has made it even clearer. But possibility is one thing, probity another. It is quite imaginable that people would not be willing to see such treatments made available. Only a few decades ago the British public was dead set against the transplantation of corneas from the dead to the living, despite the fact that it hurt nobody and could save many from blindness.
In fact, though, the public seems not to mind very much. As part of the process that led to the HFEA-HGAC report late last year, Britain’s Wellcome Trust decided to ask panels of lay people what they thought about the issues, laying out the facts in as evenhanded a way as possible. They found that, in general, people are strongly opposed to the use of cloning to create people genetically identical to anyone else, alive or dead. Lesbians and infertile women, who had been suggested as potential users for such technology, were at one with the mainstream on this. But the idea of cloning to produce embryonic cells that could then be used for tissue grafts was received much more favorably.
The cynic’s response is that the people questioned imagined a use for such technology in their own future, and that may be so. But there is another possibility–that the status of embryos changes depending on how you look at them. If an embryo is seen as the beginning of a life, it should be looked at in the light of how that life might develop. And the ways that life might develop for a clone of a person with some sort of prior existence were thought by the people interviewed–leaning on the well-worn tropes of science fiction–to be rather horrid. But if an artificial embryo is simply a route by which cells from one part of the body are regenerated to help some other part, it becomes not the start of a new life but a part of an ongoing one. There are still worries, but there is much less of a sense of a person’s being at risk.
Those who take a “pro-life” stance often make much of the uniqueness of each just-fertilized egg on the basis of its genes. But if cloning makes one point clear, it is that genes do not make lives unique, or uniquely valuable. No one thinks that “identical” twins are the same person. Every life is shaped by genes–but it is in the end a story told by its author and the society that surrounds him. Human lives are narratives, not biological blueprints inherent in the earliest embryo. While Laurence Sterne’s great novel “Tristram Shandy” does indeed begin at the moment of its hero’s conception, most of our stories don’t.
Which is not to say conception and embryos don’t matter. Shandy himself wished his mother and father, “as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.” We should all now consider ourselves duty-bound to mind about what use is made of our new technological control over such matters–which is why asking the public, as the Wellcome Trust did, is so important. These new technologies could change the stories of all our lives. We must take care to try and make those changes sensible, compassionate ones, to worry about real lives, rather than some idealized “life.”
