HUMAN CLONING AND HUMAN HYBRIDS- A FEW POINTS

If there’s one certainty on this Earth at the moment, it’s that some jerk will try cloning a human being.

Whoopee! The world’s first truly illegal human! There’s a healthy precedent.

The fact is that a cloned human wouldn’t even have a clear legal status. So far their legal definition is something that’s not supposed to happen. So quite apart from the vagaries of the technology, the dubious mentalities of those trying to produce this wonderful “non-person”, they’re outside any legal protection. If you were looking for a definitive case of someone who “didn’t ask to be born”, here it is.

Add to this delightful picture the fact that someone grown rather than born is likely to have all the information resources of a lab rat, or perhaps less, and a real breakthrough in creating new forms of human suffering is quite probable. The same high levels of intellect which have produced the outworker culture and the sex slave industry are perfectly capable of making some innovations with a person with absolutely no legal status.

Humans without normal social supports like a family are historically a resource which finds a use for itself in wars, crime, and other things which have done so much to enhance life on Earth. The Ottoman Janissaries, the African child armies, and a healthy percentage of the populations of brothels, jails, and graveyards, have all come from a much harder-to-get sources than cloned humans. It is a regular feature of history that the outcast, vulnerable, populations are used in this way. It’s been happening for millennia.

Meaning some bastard probably will find a way of making human clones a serious problem, for “natural” humans and for the clones themselves. These would be real expendable human beings, and if you think war, terrorism and organized crime are fun now, how much more so can they get?

Consider the possibilities of a cloned human, with a nuclear weapon, pointed at a target. The clone has none of the perspectives of a “normal” human. Doesn’t really need them, either, as far as “it” knows. Very basic indoctrination would simply identify normal humans as enemies. So would a social environment in which they have no rights, and can be shown that they have no rights. Therefore, the human race really isn’t their peer group, and has no claims on their loyalty or sympathies.

I would suggest that in a world where you can routinely wire a kid to go and blow someone up, this is actually the cheaper option. So it’s a lot more likely. The cloned human is a potential weapon, one of the most advanced possible. Pick a side…

The likely benefits of human cloning have meanwhile been oversimplified to the point of third rate B movies. You don’t need to clone a whole human being, to start with, to deal with medical issues. Even existing technology has already proved that you just don’t need a “spare parts person”.

If you do clone yourself, from your own genes, which is another legal right which nobody seems to have got around to investigating, to whom are you legally responsible? Can the law prevent you from using your own genes? In theory, yes. In practice, on what basis?

If you want to cure your sinus, and use your genes to clean up all the scar tissue and busted blood vessels and other exciting features of the condition, does the law have the right to tell you to be unhealthy and probably miserable on principle? How about filling in the gaps created by removal of a diseased organ? Must you use the less effective procedure, just because a law won’t allow you to use your own genes? Who owns your genes, but you?

(Another point about clones here- can they own their genes? They should, as legal persons, have a right to therapies derived from the genes they contain, but do they?)

Can you buy useful genes? Will there be a futures market in anti-aging genes? You see where this goes: it’s absurd to place restrictions which will probably make no sense on future generations of humans or clones. We have little or no idea where gene technology will go, and less idea when it will get there. Is it “ethical” to create a series of obstacles to something which we barely understand as remote possibilities? Or just plain stupid?

Ethics can be dangerous things. Ideals have started more wars than just about anything else. More seriously, they’ve been primary justifications. I suggest, that since we have no bloody idea what the situations facing future generations will be, that we shut up and get on with the practicalities. We think this world and its society is complex. What’s 4000 AD likely to be like? A bit different, perhaps? Would the people of that time thank us for including a few 2000 year old idiocies in their legal systems? Particularly those based on ideals which history will have shown to be the usual mix of self-serving assumptions of the moral high ground they usually are?

Human-hybrid species are a case in point of the new ethical Irish stew of possibilities. At the moment, they probably wouldn’t be physically viable. There are significant differences between terrestrial species, and that’s actually the definitive issue. Common genes aplenty, but they are different species.

The origin of the human hybrid goes back a long way. One of the most interesting examples of non-monster hybrids is in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men where people were adapted to live in new environments, notably Venus and Neptune. Subsequent history has been a bit less interesting, the most noteworthy incident being a person arrested for having among other things materials for creating a rat/human hybrid. That was ten or more years ago, and no doubt the unsung geniuses of cliché-land have been hard at work since. This is what you could call Melodramatic Science; not even vaguely useful, but attention-getting, and extremely brattish a la Mad Scientist Who Never Shuts Up mode.

This is an idea which has more innuendo than substance. A few issues:

1. Why create a Human Hybrid in the first place?
2. What use is it, to anyone?
3. Are they human, or just an excuse for some more bigotry?
4. What rights do they have? (Assume this to be a fundamental issue for all the following.)
5. Is it safe to create another sentient species, given that we don’t get on too well with our own?

Some answers, if not necessarily the right ones, because the need to create a hybrid species sort of vaguely suggests that something rather important is involved:

1. The most likely real reason for hybridized humans is that there’s a need for the characteristics of another species. (Do read Stapledon, if you get the chance. He’s quite Wells-like on the big pictures.) Like, the ability to retain water much better in extremely hot conditions. Maybe the ability to deal with polluted air or toxins. This would involve the acquisition of genetic capabilities the human doesn’t have. Some animals can live with levels of toxins humans can’t endure in much smaller quantities. Some fish and mollusks can contain levels of mercury which would kill a human with a thousand times the body mass.
2. The use of hybridization has to be reliable, and based on a good survival criteria. A rat/human might well be a good despecialized thing, but “useful?” Says who? A very untrustworthy concept.
3. This is one for the pedants. The glorious opportunity to babble on for decades about what constitutes a human being, with assorted whinings of no identifiable use for the last 5000 years. So let’s shut them up now. A human is one that can interbreed with another human and produce fertile offspring. Literally, the proof of being the same species. The end.
4. “Rights” is another industry for the verbose. If classified as human, they are entitled to human rights. Homo Rattus, if viable, is human. Rattus Homo, if not, is at least potentially another sentient species, and therefore can’t be denied rights, even if not human as we understand it. A bit much, don’t you think, to start trying to define “how sentient” another species is. Even more absurd, if you consider that a rat/human would literally have to evolve from square one, and the degree of sentience would have to change as it did.
5. The human race is unlikely at this point to be able to deal with another sentient species living on this planet. The culture has nothing but theories to deal with the issues. I wouldn’t be too sure that Homo Sap wouldn’t create a whole new raft of problems in the process. Add to which the fact that the human memory has no prior encounters with whatever that species is. The normal reactions to unknown situations would inevitably occur. The amount of adrenalin, alone, in such an encounter has to be considered. How rational is a human being with saturation-level adrenalin? Not very. The theory of other species, and the fact, cannot be considered to be more than distant acquaintances. A two metre tall rat-person is unlikely to produce a reaction of mature consideration and conscientious apathy. Humans don’t even have instincts to deal with that sort of situation.

Here, once again, with firm “beliefs” (How do you believe in something you’ve never even heard of?) and strong views regarding something about which it knows quite literally nothing, stands humanity, poised to land squarely on its backside yet again. Seriously, you’d have to wonder if this species has a learning disability. Perhaps it could get a pension, or something…

There are a few things that can be dealt with, now, like defining legal rights. We should do them. The rest of it, particularly the ethics of the next few million years, I would suggest might be better dealt with by those who have the facts to deal with them.