By Jill Dellamalva
Arizona Daily Wildcat
November 3, 1997

Cloning: Put your chemistry sets away and turn on the television

Arizona Daily Wildcat Jill Dellamalva

I suppose one day I will look out my window and see a tyrannosaurus rex stomping by.

This sounds like a pretty funny thing to say nowadays, doesn't it? But then, I guess people in the early 1940s found the concept of a weapon that could destroy civilization just as funny.

"When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it," said Robert Oppenheimer. He was one of the men who created the atom bomb.

Am I confusing you? Let me explain.

A few weeks ago I read a newspaper article titled "Sperm hunt." It was about a team of Japanese, British and Russian scientists who have been searching Siberian ice fields for fossilized woolly mammoth sperm cells. They want to see if the DNA contained inside has remained intact. Guess why?

That's right - as The Arizona Daily Star reported on Sept. 21: "If the DNA is whole, the group hopes to use the cells to fertilize a live elephant and produce a half-elephant, half-mammoth offspring."

One of the scientists, Kazufumi Goto, said that over several generations, a creature genetically close to the prehistoric one could be created. So far, researchers have created a cow from 7-year-old frozen sperm cells. So it IS possible.

All of this made me start thinking about cloning, and whether it's right, wrong or simply useless.

I guess the truth of the matter is that humans have been cloning each other all along - way before aspiring scientists began toying around with their chemistry sets. As a society, the majority of us want to be like the people we see on TV or in magazines. A trend is set, and we all want to follow it. We copy our friends or our heroes, so in a way, we are all clones of someone or another. It's sad, but that's why it doesn't surprise me that cloning is an issue we're dealing with now and will have to deal with in the future.

In a sense, it is human nature for us to clone. When Russia first sent a rocket into outer space, it became the goal of the United States to beat them to the moon. This is just an example of how everyone wants to get ahead and do something better than what they're doing now. One person clones a sheep, and to beat them out, the next person has to clone a human. Everyone wants to shine. The environment we live in makes us this way.

And that might be the key to the cloning issue. Because if our environment determines who we are and how we act, then no amount of cloning can make someone exactly like me or you. A clone can be my twin on the outside, but never on the inside. If scientists wanted to create a perfect person, they would have to raise it perfectly. And that's impossible.

So what's the use? Perhaps a dead loved one can be cloned, but all you'd end up with is the shell of that person. Their body would exist, but the characteristics that made them unique would not.

I'll admit, there may be some advantages to cloning. Scientists could produce replacement organs for transplant patients. Cloning could also help agriculture by enabling farmers to clone their best cows by making it possible to produce more milk from smaller herds.

These things could benefit society, but I can't help but think that eventually people would get carried away with cloning. Nothing that gives man the opportunity to control human destiny can ever have a beneficial outcome. And because cloning could be used to prevent endangered species from going extinct, it IS an attempt by man to change destiny. If a species was meant to die out, then it was meant to die out.

Sure, President Clinton banned the use of federal money for research on cloning humans and asked private financiers to stay away from such projects, but I'll bet some scientist is working on it as you read this. Our president doesn't have control over other countries, like Scotland, where scientists for the first time successfully cloned a sheep earlier this year.

Maybe we ought to spend all of this valuable time and money on helping the people on our planet right here, right now. You know, the homeless, hungry, sick, etc. - remember them? Perhaps doing this would be better than creating a whole other bunch of people to worry about.

If we keep progressing as we are, the only thing I can do is just hope that dinosaurs don't find college students appetizing.

Jill Dellamalva is a junior majoring in creative writing and journalism.