The Age of Copycats

Jinsol Lee
Ms. Wilson
AP English Language
September 17 2009

The Age of Copycats

Bernard Werber, a French author, writes in his short story Sweet Totalitarianism about a novel that predicts the consequences of legal human cloning. The book, apparently, sees very accurately the chaos that unlimited human cloning in the society might cause. The society is plagued with politicians using clones to attain infinite military strength and clones being used as objects for scientific experiments. It is hard to ignore these predictions just because they are written in a fiction piece. The use of human clones as a military force is a new view on the cloning issue, and it seems probable. In fact, once it becomes possible to produce humans at will, there would be a high possibility for this to happen, no matter if it is legal or illegal. Politicians have always felt the need to place more power under their own. The availability of infinite human resources can inspire the followers of the more obscure ideologies to take over governments. It is also possible that extremist religions try to form an army of clones and start a full-scale religious war.

Another possible outcome is the traditional idea of using clones for substitute organs. It is the most likely to occur among all potential consequences of human cloning, since pigs are already being used as substitution for human organs. Also likely is the use of human clones as objects of scientific experiments. In this case, an even more intense controversy would sweep the world. First, the religious community will oppose any use of clones that violate the law of nature and diminish the meaning of life. The religious has been criticizing science for employing no morality suitable for their discoveries and inventions. Second, social problems may break out as the wealthy save their lives with expensive substitute organs while the poor die without cure. If the phenomenon continues for a long time, descendants of the wealthy would be the majority of population after a while, which can lead to most of the population sharing certain genetic characteristics. For example, if human cloning were used for medical purposes today for high expenses, there would be inevitably more white survivors than blacks since white people dominate the rich population of the world.

Identity problems may break out as well. It is essentially impossible to grant and discriminate different identities of two genetically alike humans with contemporary technology, which includes photographs and DNA. There are also examples of government’s legal misprocessing for identical twins that possess the same DNA, birthday, and birthplace. Most likely, a solution will not help much even if someone came up with it, a great confusion would have dominated the society by that time. A solution which can, although not effectively nor permanently, alleviate the chaos is confining all clones in a closed place. This idea has been explored by several movies and books, all of which portray negative effects such as the clone rebellion or mass disorder in the society by a great escape of confined clones.

Such effects of the mankind’s attaining the ability to manipulate life are generally skeptical. Even though it might have some light sides as significant developments in the field of medicine, they are not quite worth the lives of countless clones who will be produced for commercial, political, or academic reasons.



Note: cause and effect analysis