The Daily Iowan

The small wonder of cloned sheep

Like a bad sitcom, the news about cloning sheep makes me groan at this “scientific breakthrough” and laugh about how ludicrous it all is. The scientists are at it once again: As if manipulating plants with pesticides and cows with hormones were not enough, now Scottish scientists have cloned a sheep from a ewe. It’s the first time in history that scientists have been able to clone mature cells from an adult to replicate her.

In fact, it’s eerily similar to a bad sitcom I watched as a kid: Small Wonder. The story line, about a family that made a computer named Vicki in the form of a girl, was ridiculous even then. This girl looked like a human but talked like a robot and had superhuman powers of physical and mental strength. It was just a dumb show I watched when I was bored. But the implications of this “scientific breakthrough” run along the same lines: The scientists are speculating that if they can clone a sheep, someday they just might be able to clone a human. And that’s no small wonder; it is wrong.

This obsession with manipulating nature appears to have no end. The cloning process, scientists say, could be useful for producing genetically altered animals that would produce milk containing special proteins for making drugs. It could be used also to make sperm to inseminate animals, which is not really new, since currently, few cattle are bred in the traditional way; nearly all are manipulated through artificial insemination. However, this new process fundamentally could exploit an animal to make it faster or larger.

And so when the same mentality is applied to human beings, the future looks frighteningly close to what Aldous Huxley envisioned in Brave New World, in which classes of human beings are cloned to work in certain sectors of society. Some are bred to be the leaders, others to pick up garbage. No one wishes to be in a different class because they simply aren’t programmed for that.

Although I’ll be the first to agree human beings are taught to think in certain ways and to follow certain patterns of behavior depending on how their society is structured, I believe what it fundamentally means to be human is universal. We hate, we love, we feel joy and pain. We desire, we despair. What it means to be human is to feel and think. It’s not about having bodies, but about having souls.

But being human, as mythology from around the world will reveal, is also about having an obsessive need to control. We have God or gods or spirits to pray to in order to have some semblance of control over our surroundings. And this “scientific breakthrough” is just one more factor in the ambition to have what we don’t have (the fastest racehorse, the most cattle) and to be more than we are (more beautiful, more intelligent, superhuman). Man’s desire to be a god goes back to the days of ancient myth. And we still are seeing the consequences today.

The possibility of cloning human beings, scientists say, is a long way off. However, the Clinton administration already is demanding reports on the possibilities of cloning humans and pondering future legislation to stop it. It’s not so far off that opinions about the dangers are erupting internationally and laws to shape just what it effects already are being contemplated. Maybe we’re told it’s far off. But it isn’t.

I think back to the days of Small Wonder and want to laugh. But inside, I feel a lot of fear. It’s no small wonder to want to clone live beings; it’s only an immense dread.