In February 1997, my colleagues and I announced the arrival of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.The reaction of the scientific community was, on the whole, friendly, if somewhat incredulous.In contrast, the public’s reaction was extremely negative, primed partly by a media weaned on a diet of cloning scare stories and pulp fiction.

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　　The issue was not that this new technology created an abomination, A freak animal: after all, Dolly was, and remains, a rather handsome sheep.It was the fear that the techniques could, and some said would, be applied to humans that provoked the frenzied debate.

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　　The first old chestnut raised was that there would be the cloning of dictators, followed by these possibilities, positive and negative: celebrity cloning, self-cloning, the pre-selection of citizens by the state with its echoes of Aldus Huxley’s futuristic novel Brave New World, the reincarnation of dead loved ones, treatment for infertile couples, a route to avoid parental genetic disease being passed on to children and a way to cure terminal illness.

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　　Enough time has passed since Dolly’s arrival for a sober, thorough reassessment of the prospects for human cloning and what it is about such cloning that causes people fear and concern.

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　　Many people had a genuine gut reaction to news of Dolly, and that apparently remains undiminished in its intensity.An affront to nature, a blasphemy, man playing God — such comments were often made.But we should recognize that human reproduction is a sensitive topic and a new method that has an impact on human reproduction will always be greeted with fear and revulsion by the majorities who have no problems procreating.

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　　The techniques of donor sperm insemination and in vitro fertilization, introduced in the 1950s and1970s respectively, were met with great hostility and threats of criminal legislation in some countries.That hostility moderated over the years as some early fears evaporated, and great joy was brought to some couples.But controversy remains in the very low Success rates in 1VF, and in the disputes that can arise over legal paternity between a child’s biological and non-biological parents.Although human cloning would further complicate the legal issues, this is not ground for banning it.

　　Charges that Man is “playing God” by controlling Nature are easily dismissed because, for as long as he has been able to intervene in nature, Man has been “playing God”.Medical practice is just one example.As to the cloning of dictators and celebrities, or the manufacture of a “super race”, we all understand that genetic identity does not guarantee identical personality and behavior.These uses, along with the cloning of dead loved ones, are unethical: they inevitably diminish the new individual’s sense of esteem and identity because they may consider themselves to be the product of an assembly line.
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