From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@calweb.com)
Date: Wed Feb 26 1997 - 14:16:24 MST
> On of the things that has NOT come up at all about cloning yourself
> (everyone is being very pragmatic and clinical) is how we will REACT
> to seeing our own DNA as a child, or all grown up and walking around.
Why would we expect anything different or unusual? We already know how
parents treat children, and how identical twins treat each other, so I
would expect to treat my clone in some combination of those ways. I
think it would be more likely to expect parental behavior, because even
though he's actually my twin brother rather than my son, all of the
sensory input he gives me will be child-like, not twin-like. I have no
reason to have evolved any emotional reactions to clones, but I have
very definitely evolved reactions to my children--i.e., little creatures
that look like me (this one more than usual) and that depend on me.
Having first said that cloning would be "uninteresting", I must now
concede that the medical uses will be numerous. But I maintain that
there really is no social issue at all. A child is a child is a child.
Your first sentence states the problem right off: you refer to "seeing
yourself". It's /not/ yourself, it's a kid. A completely ordinary,
crying, spitting, diaper-filling kid. And from the first moment after
conception when hormone levels in the womb in which his zygote develops
are different from those of the womb in which I developed--even if we
go to the extreme measure of using my mother as the surrogate--his
development diverges from mine, and never looks back.
I'd like to think that my little brother wouldn't develop into a
serial killer, or that we might share some interests or values, but
all I can probably count on is that he'll be tall, fair-skinned, bald,
and have green eyes. Beyond that, I'll probably hate the music he
listens to just as much as my father hated mine.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>
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