Cal Thomas has a profoundly confused and incoherent column in today's Washington Times about the evils of cloning. You see, we have clones today because the Supreme ruled the wrong way thirty years ago about abortion. If Roe v. Wade had gone the other way, there would be no cloning research, nor any desire for it.

Right.

He does make one point with which I agree somewhat..

...the population-growth fanatics don't mind when science kills, but they oppose anything that would add to our numbers. "We are more inclined to support science when it stops births than when it enables them," he said.

This was a cite from another columnist. I don't quite understand his point here, though. He seems to agree with them on the cloning issue, but not on the abortion issue.

He trots out the nonsensical myths about clone armies, and writes:

Clone wars might remove any sense of morality or immorality about war since those who are killing, or being killed, would be the fruits of soulless technology and of no greater value (but less expense) than an airplane or tank.

This is ignorant unsubstantiated nonsense. Clones are no more the "fruits of soulless technology" than was Louise Brown, the first "test-tube baby." A quarter century on, her soul would seem to be as real, or not, as anyone else's, and no rational person questions her humanity. What would be different about a clone, other than the fact that the genes were predetermined, rather than a random mix of two individuals'? Personhood is not conferred by the method of egg fertilization, and if souls exist, a clone has just as much of one as the younger of a set of identical twins.

At the end he despairs.

After 40 million (and counting) aborted babies in the United States, who, or what, is going to stop cloning? And on what grounds?

Who indeed? And on what grounds, indeed? Certainly none offered up in this editorial.

What will stop cloning economics. There simply isn't a business or economic purpose for it. Currently all so-called sucessfully cloned animals have died early so right now thats not profitable. A cloned human used as spare parts won't work if it is in ill health (nor would it make a good soldier). Science fact is far behind science fiction still and I see no one other than loons couching up money.

Maybe he saw the latest installment of Star Wars and thought it was an advertisement.

The problem with cloning is really political. What is the political status of a clone, relative to the rest of human race? Hath not a clone feelings, dimensions, organs etc? The political issue is really one of attitude, and easy to fix. You want to end cloning, a good first start is to recognize the clone as any other child, as a human being. Then the harvasting of organs and such will become less viable, killing a clone would be murder, and the incentive to create a clone would all but vanish, except for infertile couples who cannot use more natural methods of procreation.

Well, Ben, the trouble with that is that some of the cloning envisioned would involve creating a human clone so that its organs can be harvested for the benefit of the donor of the DNA.

I agree that a cloned human being should be regarded as such, with the same rights as a non-clone. But we still have a simmering controversy over the rights of non-clones, so it just won't be that simple.

All of which, of course, continues to beg the question of what constitutes a human being, and essay that I've got to get around to writing someday.

I don't believe that a bare liver (with my DNA) growing in a vat qualifies.

As far as cloning animals go, if the animal is produced for meat, then it doesn't have to live very long. Hence, cloning would be profitable for producing meat animals *if* shortened life span were the only problem. However, it turns out that with current techniques, cloning also has an incredibly high failure rate (last I heard it was several dozen failures to each successful attempt) and increased chance of defects.

Given that, once the various problems around cloning are solved, then cloning will become economically viable. One perfect animal is all that is required more or less. The advances in fertility and reproduction are rapidly applied to agriculture.

So in that vein, there's no obvious reason that cloning won't follow the same path that so many other techniques like cryogenic storage of semen, in vitro fertilization, gene modification, etc.