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Another common misconception about science concerns human cloning. Human cloning is not what you think, and, just like the production of “designer babies,” human cloning has been practiced for hundreds of thousands of years. I personally blame Michael Keaton for the public misperception of what human cloning is and the public fear and hysteria about it. In his 1996 movie Multiplicity with Andie MacDowell, Keaton’s character manages to clone himself and suddenly there are four identical versions of himself (the original and three clones). Hilarity obviously ensues!
If you think about it for more than three seconds, however, you will come to understand that this situation can never ever happen even if we had perfect technology for human cloning. There can never be four identical versions of Michael Keaton (or anybody else) existing at the same time. Cloning involves the creation of an embryo from an adult cell. You create a human baby that has the same set of genes as another (adult) human being. If Michael Keaton indeed manages to clone himself and creates three other copies, he would have three babies with his genes, not three other adults who look like him.
Even then, the clones are not identical to the original. They are only identical genetically. To believe that human clones will be exactly the same as the original (when they grow up, mind you) will require that genes determine everything about how humans turn out. As I explain in an earlier series of posts on the 50-0-50 rule (Why parenting has virtually no effect on children; Partisan attachment; Sociosexual orientation and risk of divorce; Age of puberty, and what parental divorce means for girls), genes usually determine about 50% of the outcome in most phenotypes. The clones as babies will grow up in an entirely different environment in an entirely different age and raised by entirely different parents from the original. Even if they are raised by the same parents, they are not really the same parents because they are so much older and more experienced now. (Not that parents have much influence on how children turn out, as I explain in the series above.)
So, if you really think about it, human cloning is not that much different from having children the usual way. If you reproduce biologically, then it is essentially half cloning, because your child will have half of your genes. (I’m assuming that you the reader are a human, or at least a mammal, and not a bee or an ant.)
As it turns out, there’s something even better than human cloning, a much more efficient way to produce identical humans with greater fidelity. If you have identical twins or triplets, and raise them in your family, you are essentially creating human clones who share 100% of their genes and also a large part of their environment, because they will grow up in the same family at the same time, in the same environment, during the same historical period, unlike an adult original and a clone. True, they are clones of each other, not of you as a parent, but I can assure you that identical twins raised together will grow up to be much more similar to each other than an adult original and a clone.
So there is nothing new or radically different about human cloning (even when the technology is perfected, which it has not yet been). Human cloning in the laboratory is not what you think, and humans have been truly cloning outside of the lab for the entire human history. Anyone who is scared of or scandalized by human cloning, thinking that there is something unnatural or unethical about it, got their science from Michael Keaton. He’s Batman, not a scientist.
