But if I remain relatively unimpressed by achievements thus far, I do not discount the monumental ethical issues raised by the possibility of cloning from adult cells. Yes, we have cloned fruit trees for decades by the ordinary process of grafting—and without raising any moral alarms. Yes, we may not face the evolutionary dangers of genetic uniformity in crop plants and livestock, for I trust that plant and animal breeders will not be stupid enough to eliminate all but one genotype from a species, and will always maintain (as plant breeders now do) an active pool of genetic diversity in reserve. (But then, I suppose we should never underestimate the potential extent of human stupidity—and localized reserves could be destroyed by a catastrophe, while genetic diversity spread throughout a species guarantees maximal evolutionary robustness.)
Nonetheless, while I regard many widely expressed fears as exaggerated, I do worry deeply about potential abuses of human cloning, and I do urge an open and thorough debate on these issues. Each of us can devise a personal worst-case scenario. Somehow I do not focus upon the specter of a future Hitler making an army of 10 million identical robotic killers—for if our society ever reaches a state where someone in power could actually realize such an outcome, we are probably already lost. My thoughts run to localized moral quagmires that we might actually have to face in the next few years—for example, the biotech equivalent of ambulance-chasing slimeballs among lawyers: a hustling firm that scans the obits for reports of children who died young, and then goes to grieving parents with the following offer: “So sorry for your loss; but did you save a hair sample? We can make you another for a mere fifty thou.”
However, and still on the subject of ethical conundrums, but now moving to my main point about current underplaying of environmental sources for human behaviors, I do think that the most potent scenarios of fear, and the most fretful ethical discussions of radio talk shows, have focused on a nonexistent problem that all human societies solved millennia ago. We ask: is a clone an individual? Would a clone have a soul? Would a clone made from my cell negate my unique personhood?
May I suggest that these endless questions—all variations on the theme that clones threaten our traditional concept of individuality—have already been answered empirically, even though public discussion of Dolly seems blithely oblivious to this evident fact.* We have known human clones from the dawn of our consciousness. We call them identical twins—and they constitute far better clones than Dolly and her mother. Dolly shares only nuclear DNA with her genetic mother—for only the nucleus of her mother’s mammary cell was inserted into an embryonic stem cell (whose own nucleus had been removed) of a surrogate female. Dolly then grew in the womb of this surrogate.
Identical twins share at least four additional (and important) attributes that differ between Dolly and her mother. First, identical twins also carry the same mitochondrial genes. (Mitochondria, the “energy factories” of cells, contain a small number of genes. We obtain our mitochondria from the cytoplasm of the egg cell that made us, not from the nucleus formed by the union of sperm and egg. Dolly received her nucleus from her mother but her egg cytoplasm, and hence her mitochondria, from her surrogate.) Second, identical twins share the same set of maternal gene products in the egg. Genes don’t grow embryos all by themselves. Egg cells contain protein products of maternal genes that play a major role in directing the early development of the embryo. Dolly’s embryology proceeded with her mother’s nuclear genes but her surrogate’s gene products in the cytoplasm of her founding cell.
Third—and now we come to explicitly environmental factors—identical twins share the same womb. Dolly and her mother gestated in different places. Fourth, identical twins share the same time and culture (even if they fall into the rare category, so cherished by researchers, of siblings separated at birth and raised, unbeknownst to each other, in distant families of different social classes). The clone of an adult cell matures in a different world. Does anyone seriously believe that a clone of Beethoven, grown today, would sit down one fine day to write a tenth symphony in the style of his early-nineteenth-century forebear?
So identical twins are truly eerie clones—much more alike on all counts than Dolly and her mother. We do know that identical twins share massive similarities, not only of appearance, but also in broad propensities and detailed quirks of personality. Nonetheless, have we ever doubted the personhood of each member in a pair of identical twins? Of course not. We know that identical twins are distinct individuals, albeit with peculiar and extensive similarities. We give them different names. They encounter divergent experiences and fates. Their lives wander along disparate paths of the world’s complex vagaries. They grow up as distinctive and undoubted individuals, yet they stand forth as far better clones than Dolly and her mother.
Why have we overlooked this central principle in our fears about Dolly? Identical twins provide sturdy proof that inevitable differences of nurture guarantee the individuality and personhood of each human clone. And since any future human Dolly must depart far more from her progenitor (in both the nature of mitochondria and maternal gene products, and the nurture of different wombs and surrounding cultures) than any identical twin differs from her sibling clone, why ask if Dolly has a soul or an independent life when we have never doubted the personhood or individuality of far more similar identical twins?
Literature has always recognized this principle. The Nazi loyalists who cloned Hitler in The Boys from Brazil understood that they had to maximize similarities of nurture as well. So they fostered their little Hitler babies in families maximally like Adolf’s own dysfunctional clan—and not one of them grew up anything like history’s quintessential monster. Life has always verified this principle as well. Eng and Chang, the original Siamese twins and the (literally) closest clones of all, developed distinct and divergent personalities. One became a morose alcoholic, the other remained a benign and cheerful man. We may not attribute much individuality to sheep in general—they do, after all, establish our icon of blind following and identical form as they jump over fences in the mental schemes of insomniacs—but Dolly will grow up to be as unique and as ornery as any sheep can be.
KILLING KINGS
My friend Frank Sulloway recently published a book that he had fretted over, nurtured, massaged, and lovingly shepherded toward publication for more than two decades. Frank and I have been discussing his thesis ever since he began his studies. I thought (and suggested) that he should have published his results twenty years ago. I still hold this opinion—for while I greatly admire his book, and do recognize that such a long gestation allowed Frank to strengthen his case by gathering and refining his data, I also believe that he became too committed to his central thesis, and tried to extend his explanatory umbrella over too wide a range, with arguments that sometimes smack of special pleading and tortured logic.
Born to Rebel documents a crucial effect of birth order in shaping human personalities and styles of thinking. Firstborns, as sole recipients of parental attention until the arrival of later children, and as more powerful than their subsequent siblings (by virtue of age and size), generally cast their lot with parental authority and with the advantages of incumbent strength. They tend to grow up competent and confident, but also conservative and unlikely to favor quirkiness or innovation. Why threaten an existing structure that has always offered you clear advantages over siblings? Later children, however, are (as Sulloway’s title proclaims) born to rebel. They must compete against odds for parental attention long focused primarily elsewhere. They must scrap and struggle, and learn to make do for themselves. Laterborns therefore tend to be flexible, innovative, and open to change. The business and political leaders of stable nations are usually firstborns, but the revolutionaries who have discombobulated our cultures and restructured our scientific knowledge tend to be laterborns.
Sulloway defends his thesis with statistical data on the relationship of birth order and professional achievements in modern societies, and by interpreting historical pattern
s as strongly influenced by characteristic differences in behaviors between firstborns and laterborns. I found some of his historical arguments fascinating and persuasive when applied to large samples (but often uncomfortably overinterpreted in trying to explain the intricate details of individual lives, for example the effect of birth order on the differential success of Henry VIII’s various wives in overcoming his capricious cruelties).
In a fascinating case, Sulloway chronicles a consistent shift in relative percentages of firstborns among successive groups in power during the French Revolution. The moderates initially in charge tended to be firstborns. As the revolution became more radical, but still idealistic and open to innovation and free discussion, laterborns strongly predominated. But when control then passed to the uncompromising hard-liners who promulgated the Reign of Terror, firstborns again ruled the roost. In a brilliant stroke, Sulloway tabulates the birth orders for several hundred delegates who decided the fate of Louis XVI in the National Convention. Among hard-liners who voted for the guillotine, 73 percent were firstborns; but 62 percent of laterborns opted for the compromise of conviction with pardon. Since Louis lost his head by a margin of one vote, an ever-so-slightly different mix of birth orders among delegates might have altered the course of history.
Since Frank is a good friend (though I don’t accept all details of his thesis), and since I have been at least a minor midwife to this project for two decades, I took an unusually strong interest in the delayed birth of Born to Rebel. I read the text and all the prominent reviews that appeared in many newspapers and journals. And I have been puzzled—stunned would not be too strong a word—by the total absence from all commentary of the simplest and most evident inference from Frank’s data, the one glaringly obvious point that everyone should have stressed, given the long history of issues raised by such information.
Sulloway focuses nearly all his interpretation on an extended analogy (broadly valid in my judgment, but overextended as an exclusive device) between birth order in families and ecological status in a world of Darwinian competition. Children vie for limited parental resources, just as individuals struggle for existence (and ultimately for reproductive success) in nature. Birth order places children in different “niches,” requiring disparate modes of competition for maximal success. While firstborns shore up incumbent advantages, laterborns must grope and grub by all clever means at their disposal—leading to the divergent personalities of stalwart and rebel. Alan Wolfe, in my favorite negative review in The New Republic, writes (December 23, 1996; Jared Diamond stresses the same themes in my favorite positive review in The New York Review of Books, November 14, 1996): “Since firstborns already occupy their own niches, laterborns, if they are to be noticed, have to find unoccupied niches. If they do so successfully, they will be rewarded with parental investment.”
As I said, I am willing to follow this line of argument up to a point. But I must also note that restriction of commentary to this Darwinian metaphor has diverted attention from the foremost conclusion revealed by a large effect of birth order upon human behavior. The Darwinian metaphor smacks of biology; we also (albeit erroneously) tend to regard biological explanations as intrinsically genetic. I suppose that this common but fallacious chain of argument leads us to stress whatever we think that Sulloway’s thesis might be teaching us about “nature” (our preference, in any case, during this age of transient fashion for genetic causes) under our erroneous tendency to treat the explanation of human behavior as a debate between nature and nurture.
But consider the meaning of birth-order effects for environmental influences, however unfashionable at the moment. Siblings differ genetically of course, but no aspect of this genetic variation correlates in any systematic way with birth order. Firstborns and laterborns receive the same genetic shake within a family. Systematic differences in behavior between firstborns and laterborns therefore cannot be ascribed to genetics. (Other biological effects may correlate with birth order—if, for example, the environment of the womb changes systematically with numbers of pregnancies—but such putative influences bear no relationship whatever to genetic differences among siblings.) Sulloway’s substantial birth-order effect therefore provides our best and ultimate documentation of nurture’s power. If birth order looms so large in setting the paths of history and the allocation of people to professions, then nurture cannot be denied a powerfully formative role in our intellectual and behavioral variation. To be sure, we often fail to see what stares us in the face; but how can the winds of fashion blow away such an obvious point, one so relevant to our deepest and most persistent questions about ourselves?
In this case, I am especially struck by the irony of fashion’s veil. As noted above, I urged Sulloway to publish his data twenty years ago—when (in my judgment) he could have presented an even better case because he had already documented the strong and general influence of birth order upon personality, but had not yet ventured upon the slippery path of trying to explain too many details with forced arguments that sometimes lapse into self-parody. If Sulloway had published in the mid-1970s, when nurture rode the pendulum of fashion in a politically more liberal age (probably dominated by laterborns!), I am confident that this obvious argument about effects of birth order as proof of nurture’s power would have won primary attention, rather than consignment to a limbo of invisibility.
Hardly anything in intellectual life can be more salutatory than the separation of fashion from fact. Always suspect fashion (especially when the moment’s custom matches your personal predilection); always cherish fact (while remembering that an apparent jewel of pure and objective information may only record the biased vision of transient fashion). I have discussed two subjects that couldn’t be “hotter,” but cannot be adequately understood because a veil of genetic fashion now conceals the richness of full explanation by relegating a preeminent environmental theme to invisibility. Thus, we worry whether the first cloned sheep represents a genuine individual at all, while we forget that we have never doubted the distinct personhood guaranteed by differences in nurture to clones far more similar by nature than Dolly and her mother—identical twins. And we try to explain the strong effects of birth order solely by invoking a Darwinian analogy between family status and ecological niche, while forgetting that these systematic effects cannot arise from genetic differences, and can therefore only demonstrate the predictable power of nurture. Sorry, Louis. You lost your head to the power of family environments upon head children. And hello, Dolly. May we forever regulate your mode of manufacture, at least for humans. But may genetic custom never stale the infinite variety guaranteed by a lifetime of nurture in the intricate complexity of our natural world—this vale of tears, joy, and endless wonder.
16 This essay, obviously, represents my reaction to the worldwide storm of news and ethical introspection launched by the public report of Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, in early 1997. In collecting several years of essays together to make each of these books, I usually deep-six the rare articles keyed to immediate news items of “current events”—for the obvious reason of their transiency under the newsman’s adage that “yesterday’s paper wraps today’s garbage.” But in rereading this essay, I decided that it merited reprinting on two counts: first, I don’t think that its relevance has at all faded (while Dolly herself also persists firmly in public memory); second, I fancy that I found something general and original to say by linking Dolly to Sulloway’s book, and by relating both disparate events to a common theme that had puzzled me enormously by being so blessedly obvious, yet so totally unreported in both the serious and popular press. As King Lear discovered to his sorrow, the absence of an expected statement can often be far more meaningful than an anticipated and active pronouncement. Since these essays experience a three-month “lead time” between composition and original publication, I must always treat current events in a more general context potentially meriting republication down the line—for ordinary fast-breaking news can only bec
ome rock-hard stale in those interminable ninety days.
17 Science moves fast, especially when spurred by immense public interest and pecuniary possibilities. These difficulties have been much mitigated,’ if not entirely overcome, in the three years between my original writing and this republication. Cloning from adult cells has not become, by any means, routine, but undoubted clones have been produced from adult cells in several mammalian species. Moreover, initial doubts about Dolly herself (mentioned in this essay) have largely been allayed, and her status as a clone from an adult cell now seems secure.
18 My deep puzzlement over public surprise at this obvious point, and at the failure of media to grasp and highlight the argument immediately, has only grown since I wrote this essay. (I believe that I was the first to stress or even to mention—in commentary to journalists before I published this article—the clonal nature of identical twins as an ancient and conclusive disproof of the major ethical fears that Dolly had so copiously inspired. No argument of such a basic and noncryptic nature should ever be first presented by a magazine essayist with a lead time of several months, rather than the next day by a journalist, or the next minute in cyberspace.) I can only conclude that public misunderstanding of environmental impact upon human personalities, emotions, and distinctivenesses runs much deeper than even I had realized, and that barriers to recognition of this self-evident truth stand even higher than I had suspected in the light of current fashions for genetic explanations.
The Lying Stones of Marrakech Page 34