Using technology to alter nature is a requirement of human life.
Biotechnological progress,
long under moral and legal attack, was granted a two-year reprieve last
Thursday [November 6th 2003] when the United Nations announced that
it is postponing consideration of an international ban on human cloning.
Members of that body have been fiercely divided between those, including the
United States, who seek to ban all cloning internationally, and those who seek
to ban "only" reproductive cloning. Although each side has claimed
the moral high ground, both positions are profoundly immoral. Any
attempt to ban human cloning technology should be rejected permanently,
because cloning—therapeutic and reproductive—is morally good.
Consider first therapeutic
cloning, which opponents perversely condemn as "anti-life." Senator
Sam Brownback, who has sponsored a Congressional ban on all cloning, says
therapeutic cloning is "creating human life to destroy [it]."
President Bush calls it "growing human beings for spare body parts."
In fact, therapeutic cloning
is a highly pro-life technology, since cloned embryos can be used to
extract medically potent embryonic stem cells. A cloned embryo is created by
inserting the nucleus of a human body cell into a denucleated egg, which is
then induced to divide until it reaches the embryo stage. These embryos are
not human beings, but microscopic bits of protoplasm the width of a human
hair. They have the potential to grow into human beings, but actual
human beings are the ones dying for lack of this technology. The embryonic
stem cells extracted from a cloned embryo can become any other type of human
cell. In the future, they may be used to develop pancreatic cells for curing
diabetes, cardiac muscle cells for curing heart disease, brain cells for
curing Alzheimer's—or even entire new organs for transplantation.
"There's not an area of medicine that this technology will not
potentially impact," says Nobel laureate Harold Varmus.
Opponents of therapeutic
cloning know all this, but are unmoved. This is because their fundamental
objection is not that therapeutic cloning is antilife, but that it entails
"playing God"—i.e., remaking nature to serve human purposes.
"[Human cloning] would be taking a major step into making man himself
simply another one of the man-made things," says Leon Kass, chairman of
the President's Council on Bioethics. "Human nature becomes merely the
last part of nature to succumb to the technological project, which turns all
of nature into raw material at human disposal." Columnist Armstrong
Williams condemns all cloning as "human egotism, or the desire to exert
our will over every aspect of our surroundings," and cautions:
"We're not God."
The one truth in the
anticloning position is that cloning does represent "the desire to exert
our will over every aspect of our surroundings." But such a desire is not
immoral—it is a mark of virtue. Using technology to alter nature is a
requirement of human life. It is what brought man from the cave to
civilization. Where would we be without the men who "exerted their
will" over their surroundings and constructed the first hut, cottage, and
skyscraper? Every advance in human history is part of "the technological
project," and has made man's life longer, healthier, and happier. These
advances are produced by those who hold the premise that suffering and disease
are a curse, not to be humbly accepted as "God's will," but to be
fought proudly with all the power of man's rational mind.
The same virtue applies to
reproductive cloning—which, despite the ridiculous, horror-movie scenarios
conjured up by its opponents, would simply result in time-separated twins just
as human as anyone else. Once it becomes safe, reproductive cloning will have
legitimate uses for infertile couples and for preventing the transmission of
genetic diseases. Even more important, it is significant as an early form of a
tremendous value: genetic engineering, which most anticloners object
to because as such it entails "playing God" with the genetic makeup
of one's child. At stake with reproductive cloning is not only whether you can
conceive a child who shares your genetic makeup, but whether you have the
right to improve the genetic makeup of your children: to prevent them from
getting genetic diseases, to prolong their lifespan or to improve their
physical appearance. You should have such rights just as you have the right to
vaccinate your children or to fit them with braces.
The mentalities that denounce
cloning and "playing God" have consistently opposed technological
progress, especially in medicine. They objected to anesthesia, smallpox
inoculations, contraception, heart transplants, in vitro fertilization—on
the grounds that these innovations were "unnatural" and contrary to
God's will. To let them cripple biotechnological progress by banning cloning
would be a moral abomination.
Alex Epstein is a writer for the Ayn
Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of
Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
