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January 26, 2021 - 11:00am
This year marks the 25th anniversary of a scientific milestone: the birth of Dolly the Sheep at Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute. Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell.
At the time, there were fears that the breakthrough would open the floodgates to a Brave New World scenario of cloned human beings. The nightmare was of a future in which certain individuals would be picked out on the basis of intelligence, looks or some other attribute — and then endlessly replicated.
But as far as we know that’s never happened. The first primates (a pair of crab-eating macaques) were cloned in 2017, but from embryonic, not adult, cells.
So, just another technological dead end? Not quite.
For instance, according to the Yonhap news agency, 80% of the sniffer dogs used to enforce quarantine regulations at South Korean airports are now clones. Training a dog for the task is expensive — and using new recruits with the exactly the same genetic make-up as animals that have previously proven their ability to learn cuts down on the failure rate.
The technology is being applied, commercially, to other high value animals — for instance endangered species, livestock stud animals, polo horses and, of course, the pets of the rich and famous.
Why should we care? These are specialised applications — and aren’t being used on people. Indeed, why let the Chinese and Koreans make all the running on this technology? Given British strengths in biotech, isn’t it time we made a bigger effort to bring cloning home and establish a major industry in the UK?
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SubscribeRe the photo at the top: if the sniffer dogs are clones, can they tell each other apart by smell?
Good question!
A related, but far more troubling question concerns the cloning of human beings. Ethicists have tried to grapple with the question of whether cloned humans would have soul. For many ethicists the question is moot. They simply don’t believe that humans have a unique transcendental element to their being. But we are a unique species, and what exactly constitutes our uniqueness as individual examples of that species will be one question which will inevitably arise should we ever go down this path.
Brexit Britain will be in a good position to capitalise on this new emerging technology. It also isnt going to be rich enough to have the luxury of being able to have the sort of hand wringing dreary moral qualms about it that wealthier countries may have.