A Mother’s Choice, Part I

On the two hour ride from the airport to home after our across-the-pond vacation we had a long and heated discussion on, of all things, cloning and genetic engineering (due no doubt to the fact that we are poor sports fans and I can’t discuss music in any depth since the musicians in the family have failed repeatedly to successfully explain the concept of a musical key to me).

For the last two million years or so the pressures of survival and evolution have been dictating the genetic make-up of our species. Those best adapted to pass on their genes did so and those least adapted did much less so. That was then, and this is now. Those primitive people’s had no idea why they looked the way that they did. Likely they thought it was just the way things were, but now we know. I am not saying that we now know all there is to know about the subject, but we do know enough to be dangerous and we become more dangerous by the day in this regard. Now we know about, DNA, about genes, about testing for genetic abnormalities, diseases and gender. Very soon I think we will know about human cloning and perhaps a little while after that about genetic engineering, not of crops and domestic animals mind you, but genetically engineering of people.

The first question off the block is what is wrong with human cloning and what uses might it be put to and are these bad? I have always thought that the major attraction of cloning would be the ability to have exactly what you wanted in a child. You see someone you like or go to the handy neighborhood Genebank and look through the catalog and pick out the set of features that you are looking for, get the DNA and presto (well nine months later presto), but there are other possibilities as well. Possibilities like banking the DNA of your children ‘just in case’. If there is an accident then you get a ‘do-over’. This becomes more problematic as the children age obviously. There are also those people who are egotistical enough to clone themselves and raise themselves as children (alternatively they could have others raise them as children). I came down on the side of choice personally. Although I am not a parent I find the idea of getting pretty much the child you want and eliminating chance appealing. The problem though is that unless you are cloning yourself you are not passing on your genes so it works poorly as a genetic survival scheme.

Songbird was against human cloning (with one unusual exception), the Princess was aghast at the thought of having herself as a child because it was so ‘unnatural’. Snowman kept bringing up cloning our dogs (very poor cloning candidates) and I am not sure where he stood on the whole human cloning question. I am pretty sure he wasn’t enthused by getting one of himself. So how about you?