ELEEMOSYNARY, MY DEAR WATSON:

Last week, our friend Charles Murtaugh lit out after Senator Sam Brownback for an essay on banning human cloning. Mr. Murtaugh said:

[M]ost aggravating from my perspective, is Brownback's wholesale calumny on responsible scientists:

"Ultimately, whether or not the Raelian claim of a live-born human clone is proven to be true or false, we all know that a live-born human clone is either already among us or soon will be. There are other more credible scientists around the world working feverishly for the notoriety that will inevitably accompany the announcement made by the scientist who can prove to the world that he has brought the first live-born human clone to birth."

Does he care to name some of these "credible scientists"? Of course not -- because there are none! The leading figures of animal cloning have long spoken out against human reproductive cloning, and over a year ago the National Academy of Sciences endorsed a ban on the practice.

If anyone can find a "credible scientist" openly working on baby cloning, let me know. I don't think they exist, if only because everyone knows that working on it would put them ethically outside the pale. Repeat after me: animal studies suggest that for every successfully-born human clone there would be twenty abortions, miscarriages or stillbirths. These are odds that no mainstream researcher would risk, especially given the public outcry that would result from failures. (Go take another look at the polls: over 80% of Americans favor a ban on reproductive cloning.) In fact, safety is still the major basis for scientists' stated opposition to baby cloning; I've always argued that the safety issue doesn't exhaust the anti-cloning arguments, but it's a start, and so far no "credible scientists" have tried to contradict it.

Now, I don't have any idea what credible scientists are doing in the privacy of their labs, but I am confident that they see this kind of science (cloning/genetic engineering/etc.)as a way to begin reshaping humankind in really troublesome ways. Here's a case in point, Stupidity should be cured, says DNA discoverer (NewScientist.com, 28 February 03):

Fifty years to the day from the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of its co-discoverers has caused a storm by suggesting that stupidity is a genetic disease that should be cured.

On 28 February 1953 biologists James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA - the chemical code for all life. The breakthrough revealed how genetic information is passed from one generation to the next and revolutionised biology and medicine.

But in a documentary series to be screened in the UK on Channel 4, Watson says that low intelligence is an inherited disorder and that molecular biologists have a duty to devise gene therapies or screening tests to tackle stupidity.

"If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease," says Watson, now president of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, New York. "The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't. So I'd like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent."

Watson, no stranger to controversy, also suggests that genes influencing beauty could also be engineered. "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

And I'm confident that unless we ban it entirely they'll try doing things like this. It may not seem like a bad thing to you, after all, it's the bottom 10% and they are stupid, and/or ugly. But after a few decades doing this, when you and I are in the bottom 10%, are we still going to support this kind of thing? And when, a few centuries from now, the species converges on some point of uniform looks, intelligence, etc., when humanity has lost all its savor and is marked instead by a deadly dull sameness, will we have truly "improved" ourselves?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 3, 2003 9:50 PM