Is that person real, or is it Memorex?

By Jeff Wolf

Opinion Editor

Today's column is being written by my evil clone, Jerry, so don't blame me for whatever he says. I always thought somebody jiggled the Petri dish a bit too much when they hatched him.

Sheep being cloned - genetically copied rather than genetically mixed, as in the old-fashioned method of reproduction from two sources - means humans can also be cloned and therefore will be, given that what is humanly possible eventually becomes actual.

This likelihood has generated no end of jokes. My favorite is, What do you call a copy of skater Nancy Kerrigan?

Answer: An ice queen clone.

We've heard the quips that every guy could have a Cindy Crawford clone and every gal her own Fabio. We've twittered at the prospects of countless Ross Perots running over the political landscape for the next 100 years and of Michael Jackson raising his gloved fist in perpetuity, not to mention what Madonna and Dennis Rodman might be doing for the next several eons.

But these witticisms are mere whistling past the graveyard - or past the maternity ward, as it were. In truth, the thought of human cloning frightens us deeply, even if we can't say exactly why.

Of course, there's the specter of Hitler's Nazi hordes, the perfect Aryan race multiplied ad infinitum and "Sieg heiling" its way to world subjugation. That's an image to inspire genuine fear, all right, but that's not what I'm talking about.

In all the commentary about the ethical and moral quagmire posed by human cloning, I have not heard anyone precisely articulate the fundamentally troubling question:

Would a cloned human being be an authentic person?

That is, if we produce a physically complete member of the species in a manner other than what we might describe as the original God-designed way, would the result be what we think of as a whole person? Would a clone have a soul? If so, whose? And how could we tell?

Would it be like "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers," where you couldn't distinguish the real people from the ones who just looked real?

We don't have answers to these questions. The foundations of our Christian morality don't include such a possibility. The Bible was written long before cloning was even a gleam in some mad scientist's eye and thus does not contain any appropriate directive. Those of us who are used to a ready moral touchstone in most everyday situations are left without guidance in this brave new era of post-modern technology.

Actually, the realms of science and technology left our "old" morality in the dust long before Dolly the cloned sheep was introduced to the public. The use of life-support systems, for example, became routine years before we ever started asking ourselves if it was right to keep people alive artificially beyond the point of "natural" death.

In another area, we're finding it practically impossible to govern television, which is a tiny matter compared with trying to regulate the massive, far-flung Internet.

How do we address a world that has been remade by scientific developments unknown in biblical times?

When it comes to an issue like the right to die, our traditional morality gives us general principles, not specifics, and those principles send us in opposing directions.

On one hand, we feel it is wrong to take another's life, as in the Old Testament injunction not to kill. On the other, we have the New Testament sense of compassion that it is wrong to make an innocent person endure horrible suffering. How do we resolve the conflict when our moral principles clash and both camps claim God is on their side?

And now we're cloning animals.

Oh, lots of folks are still yelping about nudity and bad language in movies, but talk about gnats and camels! Here's the real monster breathing down the neck of family values - our own technological advancement.

Back in the relatively simple 1960s, whose sexual revolution wouldn't have been conceivable without the science of birth control, Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media that our technological inventions are in one way or another merely extensions of ourselves and that we numb ourselves to this self-projection. Narcissus, McLuhan suggested, didn't realize it was his mirror image he fell fatally in love with.

Today's technology brings us to the ultimate extension of literally copying ourselves. As Pogo in the old comic strip would say, We have met the enemy and it is us. Our own evil twins.