With the advance of biotechnology, the fanciful is becoming increasingly real. Although not perfected, cloning—once the stuff of science fiction—has become ever more possible. But is it wise to create genetic carbon copies of ourselves? Is it morally justifiable to clone embryos—and, as some would remind us, destroy them—to secure the stem cells that could unlock the door to astonishing new medical treatments?

The questions surrounding biotechnology are, in the words of Robert George ’77, a member of President Bush’s Council on Bio-ethics, as prominent and poignant as any we face. And, as society begins to take them on with new urgency, Swarthmore-educated scientists, ethicists, and legal philosophers are helping lead the debate.

“It’s an exciting time to be working on these issues,” says Alex Capron ’66, a bioethicist and University of Southern California law professor who this fall became director of ethics for the World Health Organization. “But it’s also a somewhat difficult, vexing, and potentially dangerous time for society at large,” he adds.

“We’re reaching the point where we’re going to go one way or the other with this technology,” says George, a professor of juris-prudence at Princeton University noted for his ethical stand against destroying embryos for scientific research. “There’s going to be no way to stay in the mushy middle.”

Unlike the ethical questions around it or the science of actually executing it, the concept of human cloning is fairly straightforward: A nucleus containing most of the source person’s genes is extracted from his or her cell, inserted into an egg, and implanted into a womb. The result, if all goes well, is the birth of a child that is a genetic copy of the source. Another primary purpose of cloning is to produce embryonic stem cells for medical research and, if the research eventually bears fruit, hoped-for treatments or cures for diseases such as Parkinson’s or diabetes. Current U.S. law says nothing about reproductive cloning. Although research is allowed today on existing stem cells, the president has banned the cloning of new embryos for scientific work.

Last summer, while researchers, pundits, and politicians debated cloning, the headlines were making the once-abstract more concrete than ever. One story from the sports pages sounded like science fiction: The children of baseball legend Ted Williams had the body of the newly deceased slugger cryogenically frozen. In addition to hoping to bring him back to life at some point, reports said, Williams’ son wanted to sell his father’s DNA to people interested in cloning and rearing their own Ted Williamses. Meanwhile, news reports surfaced of a researcher named Panayiotis Zavos, formerly of the University of Kentucky, who claimed he was working with seven infertile couples, attempting to have cloned babies by next summer. The experiments reportedly were occurring in an undisclosed foreign country.

Are these promising directions for society?

Maxine Frank Singer ’52, an award-winning biological scientist and president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, is quick to point out that we are in no position technologically to produce the first cloned human being. With the science of reproductive cloning still raw, to attempt it with a human is reckless and dangerous, she says.

Singer, chair of the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy of the National Academy of Science (NAS), points to the dim recent history of animal cloning. Dolly, the cloned English sheep that attracted worldwide attention, appeared normal at birth but is now prematurely arthritic, among other problems. Most animal-cloning experiments have produced poor success rates. Typical is a 1999 goat-cloning experiment, cited in a recent NAS report, in which just 20 of 230 embryos produced were judged sufficiently viable for implantation in a uterus; of 20 implanted, 17 miscarried. Scientists aren’t sure why cloning is proving so difficult.

“For me, the fundamental objection to reproductive cloning is that it’s dangerous,” says Singer, who oversaw an exhaustive report on cloning produced by the NAS panel she chairs. “Parents will be bitterly disappointed by the failures. I fear that a significant number of the children who are born may be damaged.”

Singer, for one, would not ban reproductive cloning if it were ever made reasonably safe. Then, she believes, it could become a viable last resort for the small number of couples in the severest reproductive situations—cases in which both the would-be mother and father are infertile.

Like Singer, David Baltimore ’60, a 1975 Nobel Prize winner in medicine and president of the California Institute of Technology, would allow reproductive cloning if it were safe. Thoughts of a real, live “mini-me” repulse our sensibilities, he acknowledges, but because of the powerful force of environment on the shaping of a personality, a clone would never turn out the same as the genetic “parent.”

“Let us say we could reconstruct a human from a cell of Einstein,” Baltimore says, “and a young Einstein is born into our world today. Would that Einstein be the same man Albert Einstein was? I would argue no. First of all, our world is so different today. Would he even be interested in physics? I don’t know. What if he went into commerce rather than science? I’m not worried he would be another Albert Einstein.”

But what about scary scenarios like cloning farms to produce athletes, armies, servants, slaves, or a genetically superior ruling caste? Baltimore believes it is not necessary to ban cloning to prevent the fiction of Orwell and Huxley from coming true. “Our democracy protects us. No one has control over human breeding,” Baltimore says. “The real worry is a Hitler, not cloning—a leader who dictates who breeds with whom.”

Many in scientific and policy circles do not share Baltimore’s confidence that society could handle cloning if it became available. Capron and George, for instance, are troubled by its implications for the fundamental bargain at the heart of parenting and human reproduction decisions. People enter parenthood understanding that they cannot know what kind of person they will produce and that they will commit to him or her no matter what. A notion central to cloning, on the other hand, is producing a type—a copy of a beloved daughter who died prematurely, perhaps, or a duplicate of a sports hero through whom the parent can live out his own unfulfilled athletic dreams. Then comes the difficult question: What if the clone, because of environment and all the other factors that shape ability and personality, disappoints? What if the mini-Michael Jordan has no interest in basketball?

As a society, Capron notes, we tend to trust personal choice in matters of reproduction; our laws, after all, allow a woman to decide whether to bring a fetus to term. Couples are free to use such technologies as artificial insemination if they cannot have a child the conventional way. But Capron, who served on President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission, fears that personal choice might not serve us in such good stead when—or if—the era of technologically viable human cloning dawns.

“I believe individual choice is very important,” he says, “but we can’t be as confident that the choices people might make (around cloning) will have outcomes that are as predicable for them and as acceptable for society as reproductive decisions have been to this point. I don’t think asexual reproduction is just another form of reproduction. It changes in a basic way the relationship between generations. In a certain way, it obliterates it.”

Robert George has many of the same concerns. “As parents, we have a certain trusteeship over our children, but we don’t own them,” he says. “They’re not products. Reproductive cloning would replace that view with a conception of the child as a product that is manufactured to order, subject to quality controls for the satisfaction of our desires.”

Capron points to possible scenarios that are downright creepy. Suppose a husband clones his beloved wife so he can have a daughter “just like her.” Then, what is the man’s relationship to this child who bears none of his genetic material? Is she his daughter or his wife? If his wife prematurely died, would he expect the clone to fill the void?

“The desire that feeds wanting to clone is a desire that cannot be fulfilled,” Capron says. “I worry what it will mean when this desire is frustrated. The little Mozart might be more interested in going in the driveway to play basketball, and the little Michael Jordan might want to go inside and play the piano. The parent might say, ‘Wait, that’s not what I ordered.’ This is not a formula for human flourishing. This is a formula for treating children as objects.”

Unlike reproductive cloning, so-called research cloning is within the grasp of science here and now, giving the issue an immediate urgency. The prominence of Swarthmore graduates in the debate was readily apparent on the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal in July 2001, when George and Baltimore published dueling opinion pieces on the question on the same day. George, who insists that embryos are human beings in the earliest stage of their lives and thus deserving of legal rights, argued against allowing researchers to extract stem cells, which unavoidably destroys the embryo. Reflecting the view of most scientists, Baltimore argued conversely that an embryo—“a tiny mass of cells that has never been in a uterus”—is hardly a human being. Banning their use in research and eventual therapies, he wrote, would hamstring the fight against deadly diseases suffered by actual human beings.

Their unformed nature and wide-open potential are what give embryonic stem cells their unique beauty in the eyes of medical researchers. The goal is to find techniques to develop the stem cells into specific tissues and organs that could replace diseased ones in patients’ bodies—a possibility that could revolutionize medicine and save untold lives. But what makes them attractive is the same thing that makes them ethically problematic. They can be extracted from only embryos, and they cannot be “harvested” without destroying the source in the process.

Complicating the issue was news earlier this year of research indicating that the same medical breakthroughs might be possible with adult stem cells, though the results were too inconclusive to give Baltimore, for one, any confidence that adult cells could ever substitute for embryonic cells. “It would be nice if adult cells could do the same things, and I’m sure people will continue to pursue research on them,” he says. “But embryonic cells represent our only hope at the moment.”

Singer agrees with Baltimore that the paramount concern must be for the lives of human disease sufferers. “To me, you have to balance these embryonic cells against all the ill people you might help,” she says. “My colleague who has Parkinson’s disease is a wise human being who has a family and friends. To me, it’s a no-brainer to say that if we could treat him with some cells, we ought to do so.” To focus on the welfare of embryonic cells, she says, ponders only half the question—“because the life at the other end has got to be at least as precious as the couple of cells that might grow into a human being.”

But to George and others opposed to the use of embryonic stem cells, embryos surely constitute human life. To deem humans in one stage of life exploitable for the welfare of humans in another stage—to judge some lives more valuable than others—is ethically shaky indeed, they contend.

“I believe human dignity is inherent, that you have it by virtue of being a human being. And you have it from the moment you come into being,” George says. “So it seems to me that the human embryo is entitled to full moral respect and should not be treated as an entity that may legitimately be exploited and destroyed for purposes of benefiting others. To do that is to reduce the embryo to the status of being the means to other people’s ends, and, in my view, that means to treat it as a thing.”

But are embryos “human life,” deserving the same legal rights as those we regard as full-fledged people? If not, when does life begin? Illustrating the profound differences in the stem-cell debate, proponents of the two primary viewpoints disagree on the very means of approaching the question.

George contends that the answer is to be found in science as a definitive “yes.” An embryo, he says, “is not something apart from a human being like a potato or a car or a tree. Rather, the embryonic stage is simply a [step] in the life of a unitary determinate human being who will, if all goes well, by internal direction develop and mature to the next more mature stage of its development; and then, to the next; and ultimately, into adulthood with its unity, determinateness, and identity fully intact.”

Scientists Baltimore and Singer disagree. “That’s a philosophical question, not a biological one,” Singer says. “Does a new human being begin with the formation of the egg? Does it begin with the formation of the sperm? Does it begin when the two come together? ... Does it begin at eight weeks of gestation? Those are questions that are legal, philosophical, religious. They’re not biological.”

The most practical source of the answer is current law, Baltimore adds. “We allow abortion,” he says. “I believe the law of the land should prevail.”

In August, George and fellow members of the bioethics panel recommended to the president a four-year moratorium on cloning performed for research purposes and a ban on reproductive cloning. Although some pundits called the moratorium an act of “wimping out,” George says it would buy our country the time it needs to study, understand, and debate the issue.

“These issues are difficult, but they are not resistant to rational evaluation and discussion,” George says. “I think if we’re rigorous in debating, respectful of each other in conducting the debate, and willing to listen to arguments and make counterarguments, we can actually resolve these things. It does take an open mind and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. But I have faith that when people are willing to do that, we can get to the truth of these matters.”

Tom Krattenmaker is the College’s director of public relations.