The Wisdom of Repugnance: Why We Should Ban the Cloning of Humans
![handle is hein.journals/valur32 and id is 689 raw text is: THE WISDOM OF REPUGNANCE:
WHY WE SHOULD BAN THE
CLONING OF HUMANS
LEON R. KASS
I. INTRODUCTION
Our habit of delighting in news of scientific and technological
breakthroughs has been sorely challenged by the birth announcement of a sheep
named Dolly. Though Dolly shares with previous sheep the softest clothing,
woolly, bright, William Blake's question, Little Lamb, who made thee?' has
for her a radically different answer: Dolly was, quite literally, made. She is
the work not of nature or nature's God but of man, an Englishman, Ian Wilmut,
and his fellow scientists. What's more, Dolly came into being not only
asexually-ironically, just like He [who] calls Himself a Lamb2-but also as
the genetically identical copy (and the perfect incarnation of the form or
blueprint) of a mature ewe, of whom she is a clone. This long-awaited yet not
quite expected success in cloning a mammal raised immediately the
prospect-and the specter-of cloning human beings: I a child, and thou a
lamb,' despite our differences, have always been equal candidates for creative
making, only now, by means of cloning, we may both spring from the hand of
man playing at being God.
After an initial flurry of expert comment and public consternation, with
opinion polls showing overwhelming opposition to cloning human beings,
President Clinton ordered a ban on all federal support for human cloning
research (even though none was being supported) and charged the National
Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC or Commission) to report in ninety days
on the ethics of human cloning research. The Commission (an eighteen-member
panel, evenly balanced between scientists and non-scientists, appointed by the
President and reporting to the National Science and Technology Council) invited
testimony from scientists, religious thinkers, and bioethicists, as well as from
* The Addie Clark Harding Professor, The College and The Committee on Social Thought, The
University of Chicago; M.D., The University of Chicago, 1962; Ph.D. [Biochemistry], Harvard
University, 1967. An earlier version of this article was published in THE NEW REPUBLIC, June 2,
1997, at 17. The article represents a considerable expansion of testimony presented before the
National Bioethics Advisory Commission, Mar. 14, 1997.
1. William Blake, The Lamb, in AN OXFORD ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH POEMS 535 (1956).
2. Id.
3. Id.
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The Wisdom of Repugnance: Why We Should Ban the Cloning of Humans
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