Dear colleagues, I am sure you were all as stultified as I when it was announced recently that in the UK a sheep had been cloned from an udder cell of an adult ewe. Not to be outgunned in the clone wars, abashed American researchers upped the ante by quickly throwing something together in the lab, dosing up on coffee and phen/phen, pulling an all-nighter, and cloning a monkey. As any veteran watcher of science fiction movies knows, whenever an experiment is conducted on a monkey, it will be done on a human within a few days. So let's face it: the clones are coming!

But never fear. I have done some serious research on this subject by undertaking extended expeditions to both Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. Here are the startling conclusions of what the ability to clone humans will mean.

1. The average everyday decent person will find the whole idea of two genetically identical humans completely beyond the realm of human experience, and therefore totally repugnant. In fact, all people -- black and white, Christian and Moslem, Brahman and Sudra -- will consider the whole concept of selective breeding of humans to be morally abhorrent.
2. At first, only megalomaniac dictators (living or dead) will be cloned. Then, the cloned dictators will clone soldiers.
3. Anyone who is to be cloned will have to submit to a phlebotomy that is performed by having a machine simultaneously puncture his or her forearm with four orthogonally-positioned trocar-sized needles.
4. Clones will be grown in six-foot-long glass cylinders, preferably oriented in the vertical position. Those that are grown in the horizontal position will be kept in drawer-type freezers until mature.
5. Clones will be grown from zygote to adult size in a few days.
6. On emerging from their cylinders, the fully-grown (but for some reason hairless) clones will be emotionless, murderous zombies.
7. The cloning of women will include only tall, thin, beautiful ones. The cloned women will sport more makeup, wear more expensive clothing, and have fancier hairdos than the women from which they are cloned.
8. If a good man happens to be cloned, the clone will be evil. The good man will go to prison for crimes committed by the evil clone.
9. A clone will kill the scientist who performs the first cloning.
10. The scientist will be killed by having his face crushed into a control console in the cloning lab. This will ultimately cause the entire lab to blow up.
11. Eventually, all the clones will be killed, except for one young boy, who will be spirited away and secretly raised by monks. He will ultimately cause trouble, but not for another twenty years or so.

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