Cloning Gina
What cloned pets mean for us.

By Charles Murtaugh, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department at Harvard University, where he studies developmental biology.
February 20, 2002 8:50 a.m.

hen I heard the news that Texas scientists had produced a cloned pet cat, my first thought was, "Yuck — first we'll clone cats, then the next thing you know we won't think twice about cloning people." However, my next thought was of my late dog, Gina. We got Gina when I was in third grade, and she lived a long life — until my second year in graduate school. Objectively, Gina was a bad dog, always getting into the garbage and jumping onto sofas. In our hearts, though, she was the best dog imaginable, loving, playful, and irreplaceable — or so we had assumed.

What the copycat news made me realize is that if given the chance, I probably would have cloned Gina. And in this realization is the silver lining for those of us opposed to human cloning: The very harmlessness of cloning pets throws into sharp relief the evils of cloning children.

Why not clone my old dog? I always regret that my wife never got to meet Gina, having heard so much about her from my family and me. Now she could not only meet her, we could raise her together. When we have kids, they could have the same joy of living with Gina, growing up with Gina, that my brother and I had. Even better: Since I know already know Gina's temperament, and since I have some idea of the mistakes we made with her as a puppy, I could have a second chance to correct those mistakes. Once she'd grown up, I always regretted that we hadn't been firm enough when we taught her to "heel." No such mistakes with Gina II!

My plans for Gina II may strike you as creepy, but it's hard to describe them as immoral. After all, we accept that dogs and cats are our property, and that we are their masters. (Cat owners may insist that their pets have no master, but when you're holding the laser pointer, and the cat is chasing the red dot around the room, it's pretty clear who's in charge.)

A pet lives for our pleasure. We can do everything short of beat and starve our cats and dogs, with no fear for legal consequences. And heaven help the lower vertebrates, which live in constant danger of being flushed down the toilet. We love our pets, but we still control them; cloning a dog is not terribly different from putting a leash on it.

Our relationship with our children is different. At least in modern Western cultures (and I suspect this attitude is more universal), we view our control over our offspring as necessarily transient and incomplete: Children need to be supervised and kept out of trouble when they are too young to know better, but as they grow older they will assume increasing moral autonomy, eventually becoming adults like their parents. Most of us wrinkle our noses at the sight of toddlers literally leashed to their parents, just as we insist that a teenager who commits a crime is more culpable than an eight year old who does so.

In a recently published 1951 letter, Isaiah Berlindiscussed the problem of reconciling our insistence on human autonomy with the necessity of educating and raising children:

. . . all "moulding" is evil, and . . . if human beings at birth had the power of choice and the means of understanding the world, it would be criminal; since they have not, we temporarily enslave them, for fear that, otherwise, they will suffer worse misfortunes from nature and from men, and this "temporary enslavement" is a necessary evil until such time as they are able to choose for themselves — the "enslavement" having as its purpose not an inculcation of obedience but its contrary, the development of power of free judgment and choice; still, evil it remains, even if necessary.

This gets at the heart of why so many Americans find human cloning so repugnant, in spite of their ambiguity (to say the least) about the rights of embryos, and their inability to imagine Brave New World-type dystopias. A cloned child, made rather than begotten, is a pet: His or her "breed" picked out for its "unique characteristics" just as a border collie is chosen for its intelligence and a poodle because it doesn't shed much hair.

Our children do not live for our pleasure. They are not pets, and we are not their masters. In addition to warming the hearts of their owners, cloned pets may serve as living, breathing reminders that the bonds of family life are not simply psychological leashes.