Human life is not sheep: an ethical perspective on cloning.

On February 22, 1997, the media were abuzz with the announcement that Scottish geneticists had—eight months earlier—successfully cloned (copied) a sheep named Dolly. Quite understandably the Scottish achievement of sheep-cloning was treated as a newsworthy milestone in the smoothly speeding advance of modern biotechnology. Not since the advent in the late 1970s of Louise Brown, the celebrated ̃rst test-tube baby, has public attention been so focused on the biological revolution under way in our time. The thing that made Dolly loom so large, of course, was that she signaled the imminent feasibility of applying comparable procedures and technology to the cloning of human beings. And this prospect has sent everyone scrambling. Arthur L. Caplan admits that unfortunately “we don’t have the legal and ethical basis to handle [these rapid developments] yet.” Prudence urges that we ought to proceed slowly on a matter of such potentially great import. Consequently the United Nations, Bill Clinton and others have issued cautious statements that are essentially designed to buy some time and carve out some breathing space to weigh the implications of