In the next century we’ll be able to alter our DNA radically,
encoding our visions and vanities while concocting new life-forms. When Dr.
Frankenstein made his monster, he wrestled with the moral issue of whether he
should allow it to reproduce, "Had I the right, for my oval benefit, to inflict
the curse upon everlasting generations" Will such questions require us to
develop new moral philosophies Probably not. Instead, we’ll
reach again for a time-tested moral concept, one sometimes called the Golden
Rule and which Kant, the millennium’s most prudent moralist, conjured up into a
categorical imperative: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; treat
each person as an individual rather than as a means to some end.
Under this moral precept we should recoil at human cloning, because it
inevitably entails using humans as means to other humans’ ends and valuing them
as copies of others we loved or as collections of body parts, not as individuals
in their own right. We should also draw a line, however fuzzy, that would permit
using genetic engineering to cure diseases and disabilities but not to change
the personal attributes that make someone an individual (IQ, physical
appearance, gender and sexuality). The biotech age will also
give us more reason to guard our personal privacy. Aldous Huxley in Brave New
World, got it wrong: rather than centralizing power in the hands of the state,
DNA technology has empowered individuals and families. But the state will have
an important role, making sure that no one, including insurance companies, can
look at our genetic data without our permission or use it to discriminate
against us. Then we can get ready for the breakthroughs that
could come at the end of the next century and the tech nology is comparable to
mapping our genes: plotting the 10 billion or more neurons of our brain. With
that information we might someday be able to create artificial intelligences
that think and experience consciousness in ways that are indistinguishable from
a human brain. Eventually we might be able to replicate our own minds in a
"dry-ware" machine, so that we could live on without the "wet-ware" of a
biological brain and body. The 20th century’s revolution in infotechnology will
thereby merge with the 21st century’s revolution in biotechnology. But this is
science fiction. Let’s turn the page now and get back to real science. It can be concluded from the text that the technology of human cloning should be employed ______ A. excessively and extravagantly.