Before Henry Ford gave us the assembly line, nightmare fantasies concerned individual monsters, like giants, golems, and walking mummies. But with the assembly line came a new thought: What if evil, dangerous human beings could be manufactured the way Ford made Model Ts? Identical super-soldiers would march out of factories by the millions, ready to go into battle to impose their master's will on the rest of the world.
When cloning became a possibility, people like George Lucas--people who don't think through the logic of their premises--thought, "Aha! This is how the armies of marching morons might be created!"
There are several reasons why this will never happen.
First, and most important, such armies aren't needed. It's simply too easy to persuade human beings who were born in the normal way to become million-man armies. Tell them a good story about why God or their mothers (or both) want them to go out and kill for their country, and voila!--all the cannon fodder you could hope for.
Second, cloning doesn't speed up anything. Clone a human, wait ten years, and you have ... a ten-year-old. O.K., says Lucas in "Attack of the Clones," we don't just leave them to grow alone. As long as we're making up wacky science projects, we'll say we've learned how to accelerate the growth of these clones. They'll reach adult size in, say, five years. Plus, we've genetically modified them to be supermen, aggressive fighters who are strong and quick, but totally obedient to their masters.
Remember that old paradox "If God is omnipotent, then he can make an object so massive that even he cannot move it. But if he can't move it, then he isn't omnipotent after all." The same absurdity is at work here: Can science manufacture a human without including all the steps that make us human? Cloning, in theory, makes a genetically identical copy of an existing organism. But we are far, far more than our genes, and skipping the non-genetic steps could make a clone useless for fighting or anything else.
Consider natural clones--identical twins. At a genetic level, there are no differences between them. Their physical appearance can be nearly indistinguishable. Yet they can have very different personalities. Almost immediately, they develop different memories, different needs and desires, and they make different decisions. Whatever our genes may provide us with, we're just as strongly influenced by parents and siblings, our communities, and events such as diseases, injuries, and experiences that give rise to fear or guilt, shame or pride.
Even if science could speed up the physical maturation of our bodies, what would it do to a human being if we raced him or her through infancy, childhood, and adolescence? An awful lot of us don't finish with childhood and adolescence until we're years into our adult lives; some of us enter our second childhood without ever graduating from our first. Children who have had adult responsibility or experience thrust upon them too soon are usually damaged by the experience, sometimes quite severely.
So much for accelerated growth. What about obedience?
I'm not sure we need to clone for this trait either. The human race has been selecting for conformity for a long time. Even before junior high school was invented, adolescents have felt a powerful desire to conform to the norms of the surrounding society. That's partly why soldiers do such brave-and-foolish things in battle. Four years into WW I, veterans of trench warfare were still obeying orders to climb out of their trenches and expose themselves to murderous machine gun fire. Like them, we have been socially and genetically selected for honor. Most of us would rather die, literally, than to be shamed in front of our immediate social group.
But the best soldiers can't afford to be docile clones. Every commander knows that at least some of their fighters have to be smart and adaptable. No matter how carefully a battle is planned, unpredictable things will happen; soldiers have to respond intelligently and boldly or the cause is lost.
Furthermore, cloning defeats the central purpose of sexual reproduction. We need to remix our genes so that our species remains adaptable. We gain nothing when we clone the same individual over and over. Any society that relied on cloning rather than sex to reproduce itself would, eventually, fail to compete effectively for survival.
Even if we overcome the obstacles that make cloning so impractical--the high failure rate, the fact that we have to use precisely the same cells already used for sexual reproduction - why bother? The answer is simple. We don't need cloning in order to create human beings. We need cloning in order to create spare organs in order to make repairs.
There is also a nightmarish version of this type of cloning, with full-grown copies of ourselves kept in closets or refrigerators so we can cut them up when we need body parts. (And, of course, there's the inevitable thriller in which your clone tries to kill you and replace you.) But that presupposes the idea that we would do something as wasteful and morally reprehensible as creating entire human organisms as organ banks.
I write science fiction. As long as we're supposing solutions to scientific problems, suppose too that we will eventually learn how to grow tissues and organs within the body. This should be possible once we understand how embryos go about instructing different cells to grow into different body parts. Once we know how to do it, we can start a clone and grow it into a heart or a liver. More to the point, we could do it inside the host's body. Need new bone marrow? Need a heart transplant? We extract (or remove from the freezer) your own embryonic tissue, stimulate it to start growing into the needed organ, and then put it in place beside the old, failing organ. As it grows, we shunt more and more of the organ's function away from the old one. No rejection, since it's your own tissue. No waiting for somebody else to be killed violently under exactly the right circumstances to make their organs available. And it completely avoids the moral issue that makes abortion so problematical: killing a genetically distinct human.
Here's the golden rule of cloning: If you wouldn't do it to a twin, you shouldn't do it to a clone. We could start by protecting clones from being forced to appear in really dumb sci-fi movies.
