- NEW YORK - Cloning humans would be a "poor method indeed for improving
on the human species," writes a Harvard Medical School professor this
week in The New England Journal of Medicine.
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- Although he believes a ban on experiments
in mammalian cloning would be a setback to research in embryology, Dr.
Leon Eisenberg argues in his essay that proposals for human cloning as
a method for improving the species are "biologic nonsense."
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- He points out that cloning humans, even
if possible, would restrict the diversity of the human gene pool, which
would endanger the ability of the species to survive major environmental
changes.
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- Moreover, he argues that the perfect,
cloned human who is well suited to the world in which he or she matured
may not have the attributes needed just a generation later.
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- "Cloning would condemn us always
to plan the future on the basis of the past," writes Eisenberg, the
Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at Harvard Medical
School.
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- In addition, Eisenberg argues that while
the basic plan of the central nervous system is laid out in the human set
of genes, or genome, and could potentially be cloned, the brain and mind
continue to develop after birth. "The elaboration of pathways and
interconnections is highly dependent on the quantity, quality, and timing
of intellectual and emotional stimulation," Eisenberg writes. "The
very structure of the brain, as well as the function of the mind, emerges
from the interaction between maturation and experience."
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- For example, the author says that to
produce another musical genius like
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- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, "we would
need not only Wolfgang's genome but his mother's uterus, his father's music
lessons, his parents' friends and his own, the state of music in 18th-century
Austria, Haydn's patronage, and on and on...."
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- Eisenberg writes that the real moral
issues regarding improving the human species are "the ways in which
the genetic potential of humans born into impoverished environments today
is stunted and thwarted. To improve our species, no biologic sleight of
hand is needed. Had we the moral commitment to provide every child with
what we desire for our own, what a flowering of humankind there would be."
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