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Grupo de Trabalho 7
Biotechnology: a Post-Cartesian Marriage

Verena Stolcke[1]

I have given you, Adam, neither a predetermined place nor a particular aspect nor any special prerogatives in order that you may take and possess these through your own decision and choice.  The limitations on the nature of other creatures are contained within my prescribed laws.  You shall determine your own nature without constraint from any barrier, by means of the freedom to whose power I have entrusted you.  I have placed you at the centre of the world so that from that point you might see better what is in the world.  I have made you neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal so that, like a free and sovereign artificer, you might hold and fashion yourself into that from you yourself shall have chosen. (Pico de la Mirandola 1486)

[Yet] homo sapiens has overcome the limitations of his origin.  Now he can guide his own evolution.  In him, Nature has reached beyond the hard regularities of physical phenomena.  Homo sapiens, the creature of Nature, has transcended her.  From a product of circumstances, he has risen to responsibility.  At last he is Man.  May he behave so! (Fox Keller 1992:288)

Introduction

These are two visions of humans' place in nature written down over five centuries apart. They portray two moments in the imposition of the arrogant spirit of Western modernity which enthroned Man as the master and owner of nature, which substituted action for contemplation, reason for faith, scientific theory for myth (Jacob 1882:9; “De la nature à la nature humaine” 1994:5-8).

Renaissance humanism recognized human dignity and made Man the measure of all things.  The exaltation of freedom was a major theme among humanists although at first this freedom was thought to be exercised in nature and society.  Humankind was part of nature, nature was its realm and the features that tied it to nature (the body, its needs, its sensations) were conceived as essential to humans and impossible to ignore.  Five centuries later it was this freedom which had laid the ground not only for secular explanations of the order in nature and society but for transforming human nature itself.  The biogenetic revolution had succeeded in outwitting the very laws of the human condition.  Although only a lamb, Dolly the clone is the emblematic image of modern life scientists’ incessant quest for transcending nature.

The sensational news in February 1997 of the creation of Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, confirmed the hopes but also the fears of many that science and technology had brought us ever closer to redesigning our own species.  Dolly illustrated the vertiginous advances made over the past four decades in molecular biology and biotechnology, precipitated by life scientists' modern fascination with conquering the ultimate secrets of life.  The creation in the lab of genetically enhanced human beings in the twenty first century, heralded as the “biotech century,” appeared ever more likely in the wake of Dolly’s celebrated birth (Freundlich 1997; Craig Venter and Cohen 1997:32).

Dolly was a true scientific breakthrough and the outcome of prolonged experimentation.  Cell nucleus transfer, the technique required for cloning, had been done before, with frogs, mice, cells, embryos, and fetuses (Bloom 1997).[2]  But Ian Wilmut, Dolly's “father,” and his team at the Roslin Institute in Scotland overthrew a long-established biological principle by demonstrating that cloning from the nucleus of an adult differentiated cell was possible.  Contrary to prevailing biological wisdom, an adult cell nucleus’ biological clock could be turned back to its primitive totipotential stage so as to begin to differentiate anew and give rise to the development of complete new organisms.

Most of the extensive news coverage of Dolly’s creation focused on the prospect of human reproductive cloning, that is, the production of a human foetus with the same nuclear genome as another human.  Dolly is a normal sheep except for its conception and therefore its genetic endowment, which is substantially that of the adult ewe from which she was cloned.  Dolly has three “mothers” but no “father.”  According to the dramatic description one could find on the internet at the time,

to clone Dolly, Wilmut and his colleagues took a mammary gland cell from a six-year-old ewe.  Wilmut then removed the nucleus of a sheep egg cell taken from a different ewe, and inserted the mammary cell into the now nucleus-free egg cell.  Wilmut then zapped the two combined cells with a jolt of electricity, and to general amazement the combined cells acted like a fertilized egg cell and began to divide, using the DNA from the mammary cell as its genetic blueprint.  He then implanted the now developed embryo into yet another ewe, and in a few months Dolly was born, an exact genetic copy of the ewe from which the mammary cell had been taken. (Mario 1997:2; Kolata 1997)

By substituting the cell transfer for sexual insemination in the “immaculate conception” of Dolly, Wilmut’s team had succeeded in overcoming yet another biological barrier in the creation of life in the laboratory.  As The Economist wrote at the time:

One block on large-animal engineering is that the most revolutionary technique in mouse transgenics--called embryonic stem cell technology--does not work in many other mammalian species. . . Nuclear transplantation, Dolly’s immaculate conception, may be one way of overcoming this barrier in sheep and other species.  Present company not included? (Anonymous 1997c:81)

Cloning means not only a quantitative but a qualitative shift in reproductive technology.  In-vitro fertilization is employed to overcome physiological obstacles in conception by technological means without altering the basic “facts of life,” qualitatively--that is, sexual reproduction as a species characteristic in mammals.  Although this is very often not realized, reproductive cloning entails, by contrast, a fundamental alteration of the procedure of fertilization since conception occurs in the lab not only without coitus but without sperm.

Until very recently the notion that animals, let alone humans, might sometime be conceived asexually, sounded more like science fiction even to such intrepid geneticists as James Watson.  In 1971 Watson had regretted that the crucial steps in human embryology inevitably occurred in the inaccessible womb of a human female.  “There the growing foetus enlarges unseen, and effectively out of range of almost any manipulation except that which is deliberately designed to abort its existence” (Watson 1971:50, emphasis added).  Even so, Watson trusted that it would not be long until scientists would penetrate the protective abode of the female womb.  The unexpectedly rapid progress made in in-vitro fertilization of human eggs, he prophezied, would not only render embryological development “wide-open to a variety of experimental manipulations,” it would initiate “a frenetic rush to do experimental manipulation with human eggs once they have become a readily available commodity” (Watson 1971:51-53).  The development of cloning has revolutionized all this.

There are spectacular biological and symbolic dimensions to this biotechnological circumvention of traditional “facts of life” in mammals.  Cloning provides a privileged--because disturbing--opportunity to better understand the dynamic interaction between biogenetic theory and socio-cultural ideas, between biotechnological innovations and socio-structural processes at a time when biotechnology is everyday pushing back the frontier of life and death.  Yet, to begin to appreciate the human implications of biotechnology, we need to be scrupulous in identifying the novel biological “facts” so as to capture the very materiality of biotechnological innovations as a condition for assessing the underlying scientific, political and economic motives within their socio-cultural context.  My aim in this chapter is consequently threefold: to describe the biotechnological facts of cloning; to uncover the set of reasons that may lead to its application among humans; and, lastly, to provide the background to gauge the effects cloning might have both biologically and culturally for consecrated Western notions of sex and conception, of parenthood and kin, and for gender relations.

Bio-Technicalities

Dolly the lamb was cloned from a cell taken from an adult sheep and fertilized in an asexual manner.[3]  The critical technique in mammalian cloning is nuclear transplantation in which the intact nucleus of one cell is absorbed into an egg whose nucleus has been previously removed.  A report on primate cloning at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center, where a Rhesus monkey had been produced in 1997 by nuclear transfer of undifferentiated cells, carried a graphic description of the procedure:

Nudging a high-tech joystick, she (the researcher) directs a hair-thin glass needle toward the silvery orb--touching, dimpling and then gently piercing its outer coat.  “We’re in,” says Dominko, as she injects a tiny payload of monkey DNA to replace the egg’s own genes, already removed.  She backs the needle out of the egg, leaving the new genes in their yolky home to direct the growth of a monkey that will be biologically identical to the one that donated the DNA. (Weiss 1999:1)

For most people sex means women and men copulating or “having sex.”  In a strictly biological sense, however, sex refers to the recombination of gametes coming from distinct sources to produce a new individual.  Sex is thus equivalent to reproduction (Margulis and Sagan 1998:2,17).  From an evolutionary perspective sex is regarded as an information exchange and hence a genetic diversity enhancing mechanism which provides bisexual species with special adaptive advantages.  Nuclear transfer replaces the combination of genes from two progenitors in mammalian sexual conception.  As a new asexual technique of procreation, cloning enables reproduction in the most literal sense of producing genetically almost identical copies of the cloned organism.  And in addition to replacing coupling and/or insemination, cloning displaces the role of the male in sexual reproduction because nuclear transfer dispenses with insemination of the oocyte by a male gamete in reproduction.

François Jacob, the French Nobel prize-winner in medicine in 1965, caught this procreative peculiarity of Dolly, the lamb, with subtle irony:

for a long time we attempted to have pleasure without children.  With in-vitro fertilization we have children without pleasure.  And now we have come to make children without pleasure and without spermatozoa. . . . Evidently this changes family structure somewhat . . . for the moment at least among sheep. (Nodé-Langlois and Vigy 1997)

Dolly at first elicited widespread alarm in scientific, social and political circles above all because of fears about potential uses and abuses of cloning in humans.  Such anxieties very soon became confined to the cloning of a human foetus or child deemed universally unacceptable ethically.

Extrauterine fertilization is a necessary condition for molecular biological research to advance in developing biotechnology.  Cloning of adult mammals, and very recently of human embryo stem cells, are the latest achievements.  These scientific feats are not exclusively due to Western man’s proverbial thirst for knowledge and amelioration of life but are conditioned decisively by powerful economic interests, dominant scientific-political paradigms, bio-medical ambitions, and prevailing as well as newly induced socio-cultural desires and needs.

Already towards the end of Dolly’s birth year, the cloning debate, in effect, showed signs of turning around in the scientific and bio-medical community--especially in the United States, where the economic and bio-medical stakes in biotechnology are by far the biggest in the world.  Biotechnological laboratories, multinational pharmaceutical companies and investors, in the United States more than elsewhere, have by now put vast sums of money into genomic research in anticipation of the extraordinary technological and economic potentialities of genomics and biotechnology, as confidence grew that cloning would revolutionize medicine (J. Cohen 1997).

Beside international economic rivalry, scientific and intellectual competition forms an integral part of the modern world fragmented into nation states and is intensified by commercial interests which have gained priority over public interests in the biotechnological race (Ruiz de Elvira 1999:29).  The higher the stakes the greater is national and international competition for patents and markets of biotechnologies and genes (Rifkin 1999:7-9).  Competition is further enhanced by uneven international economic involvement in human biotechnological research and varying attitudes toward cloning (Anonymous 1998d; Comité Consultif National d'Éthique 1997; Human Genetics Advisory Commission 1998; May 1998:49-51).[4]  One illustration of this comes from the position statement on human cloning prepared by the Australian Academy of Science in February 1999, where it was argued that “For Australia to participate fully and capture benefits from recent progress in cloning research” and “capitalize on (its) strength in medical research” it was considered necessary to revise or repeal restrictive legislation (Fundación de Ciencias de la Salud 1999:349-350).[5]

For biotechnological achievements to become a lucrative economic proposition, a social demand for the new services must exist or be created.  Biotechnological supply and social demand interact in subtle and dynamic ways mediated by scientific journals, the media, and commercial publicity appealing to the public’s hopes.  Cloning could serve, as it is suggested for example, to quickly create herds of identical animals that churn out medically useful proteins, open up new avenues for research into development including ageing, provide a cure for heart disease, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s as well as an endless supply of organs for transplant (Pennisi 1997:2038).

As private interests and investment grew and the pace of research speeded up, government regulation of biotechnology has proved largely ineffective.  A whole range of  more or less surrealist motives have been proposed for reproductive cloning: to produce a clone for a couple seeking replacement for a dead child or a fully compatible donor for a dying child, or as an attempt to perpetuate some extraordinary artistic or intellectual talent.  But acceptance in bio-medical circles of experimentation with human cloning increased especially with regard to gene therapy and finding a cure for infertility.  This moderated early opposition to the extent that some researchers admit publicly their optimism about the cloning of a human being: “...[A]s with all breakthroughs it's not possible yet to foretell exactly where cloning will lead. ...There have been whispers that such cloning may one day have a place in giving infertile couples genetic offspring” (Pennisi 1997:2039).

Spare Body Parts: The Next Step?

Two years after her celebrated birth it looks like Dolly the lamb let the biotechnological genie out of the bottle of molecular biological research.  The latest major accomplishment in the field is the manipulation and cloning of human embryo stem cells, “probably the biggest development since recombinant  DNA,” as even Rifkin, the vocal critic of biogenetic developments,  felt compelled to admit (Butler 1998:104).

Commercial enterprises had been funding much of the biotechnological animal research. Scientists had experimented with nuclear replacement cloning in animals in the expectation of improving methods for the genetic enhancement of livestock by adding genes to give desired traits, to produce human proteins in the milk of transgenic animals and to protect humans by genetic engineering against genetic diseases (Kolata 1997:A1, A7).  One especially striking example of the hidden link between private profit and public interest is the financial support the Council for Tobacco Research provided for Bob MacKinnel's work on frog cloning as part of basic cancer research (Wertz 1998)!

The first experiments with cloning of human cells fused with cow's eggs appear to have taken place at a small U. S. company in 1995 and 1996 even before Dolly's birth.  The company made the experiments public, however, after the successful isolation and culture of human embryo stem cells was announced in November 1998 (del Pino 1998:26).  In the latter instance, two independent teams of U.S. researchers working at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and at Johns Hopkins University, respectively, produced cultures of human embryo stem cells by extracting cells from embryos in their earliest phase of development (Sampedro 1998:27; Anonymous 1998a; Gearhart 1998).  One team had obtained the manipulated embryos in-vitro with the informed consent of their biological parents, the other had used aborted five- to nine-week-old embryos.  In other experiments, so-called “ownerless” embryos stored at infertility clinics were employed for human embryo stem cell research (Anonymous 1998b:34; del Pino 1999:34).

Stem cells, or more correctly their nuclear DNA, contain the complete genetic information needed to generate an adult organism.  Stem cells, also called progenitor cells (or células madre--”mother cells” in the Spanish media), are unique in that they have the potential of growing into all types of human cells, such as like cancer cells, and that they are immortal, since they have the capacity to grow indefinitely and differentiate in the lab.  Beside embryo splitting, which has been more frequently used,[6] nuclear substitution is a fundamental and quicker technique for cloning animals.  The technique used to create Dolly involved nuclear transfer into an egg and not into an embryo.  Stem cells obtained from human embryos would be implanted into a donated and enucleated oocyte and thereafter stimulated into differentiating to develop into any kind of organ or tissue desired.  This new procedure for the manipulation of human embryos would certainly constitute an aestheticly attractive alternative to the production of pig organs for transplant into humans--a procedure which was also attempted by Wilmut’s team (“El laboratorio que creó a ‘Dolly’ se propone clonar cerdos para transplantes” 1998).  Human embryo stem cell cloning would permit the growth of human tissues--for example of skin, bones, muscles or the heart of human adults--for therapeutic purposes such as organ transplants (Marti 1998; Ferrer 1998).  Professor Silver, an outspoken molecular biologist at Princeton University, thought, for instance, that cell or tissue replacement therapy, although it was likely to raise ethical problems because of the manipulation of human embryos, was clearly preferable to producing a cloned child as a source of spare body parts or tissues (Silver 1998)![7]  Silver obviously did not have qualms about the cloned production of spare body parts.

Shortly after this new feat on the cloning front, the news broke in Britain that the government was studying a revolutionary proposal, a sort of biotechnological “eternal life” insurance obtained at birth, which had been submitted jointly by the cloning pioneers at the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh, and the University of Wisconsin team responsible for the cultures of human embryo stem cells.  The researchers had suggested that a tissue bank of all newborns be established for future transplants (Anonymous 1998c:30).  With hindsight, the proposal turns out to be not at all preposterous.  Two private U.S. firms, Geron of California, and Advanced Cell Therapeutics of Massachusetts, are experimenting systematically with human embryo cloning.  Geron uses human eggs while ACT employs cow eggs, which are much more abundant.  The resulting embryos are intended as stem cell banks (Valenzuela 1999:50).  These experiments re-open not only the old debate on the beginning of life but pose the question of the “end” of life.

The biotechnological race has proved two things: not only is cloning of human tissue technically feasible, but legal and public funding restrictions have failed utterly in stopping biogenetic experimentation in humans.  Under pressure from a frustrated scientific community, viciously competing under unequal conditions with the private sector, the United States government took the pragmatic decision to exempt human stem cell research from the ban on human embryo experimentation and made federal funds available once again (Aguirre de Cárcer and Fernández-Rúa 1999:69; Fundación de Ciencias de la Salud 1999:325-380).[8]  To the dismay of researchers, the British government decided in June 1999 to uphold, by contrast, the ban on human embryo cloning for medical research and to establish an independent advisory group due to report about half a year later (Donelly 1999:1; Taylor 1999:1-3).[9]

There is, then, intensive competitive pressure on the biotech industry and on national governments to be first in the biotechnological race--a pressure that may collide with ethical concerns.  Nonetheless, this makes regulation more or less impossible.  This reluctance or inability to regulate cloning is evidenced also in the taxonomic tricks that scientists and ethics committees play to protect as large a field of biotechnological research from regulation by conceptually circumscribing as truly unacceptable specific types of cloning--the production of a human foetus--so that no ban would stand in the way of cloning research for “stem cell replacement therapy.”  For example, as the Australian Health Ethics Committee advised in December of 1998, “A basic distinction should be drawn between the cloning of a whole human individual and the copying (also referred to as ‘cloning’) of the component parts of a human (such as DNA and cells)” (Fundación de Ciencias de la Salud 1999: 344, 348).

More intensive and extensive biotechnological intervention in the human condition may nurture the hope of diminishing the hazards and constraints of nature.  This is a typically modern illusion, since biotechnological manipulations may entail unexpected new forms of bio-medical aggression and control.

Indeed, neither last nor certainly least, there are the potential military uses of biotechnology brought to light by an unexceptionable source.  The British Medical Association has drawn attention to alarming evidence that biotechnology might be employed to produce lethally accurate tools of genetically engineered selective death.  In a world of rising political-ethnic confrontations, the genetic map of the human species developed under the Human Genome Project in combination with population genetics and genetic engineering may serve for the secret production of “ethnically intelligent” biological weapons capable of destroying selected ethnic groups (Bayo 1999:36).

“I don’t think nature is a fixed thing”[10]

Above I have offered a fairly straightforward review of the different technical aspects and developments of cloning set in the broader context of biotechnology as a dominant commercial-political market force in our times.  The chance that “ethnically” intelligent weapons may be produced provides disturbing evidence of the old links that exist between science, economic interests, and structures of power.

The endeavour to understand and weigh the human consequences of biotechnological innovations also poses an ontological and epistemological problem--namely, how to make sense of the materiality in relation to the socio-cultural meanings and reception of biotechnological developments.

Beside the general embeddedness of science and technology in structures of power, there is something peculiar to modern times about biotechnology's progressively swifter transfiguration of the “facts of life.”  Homo sapiens, and for that matter mulher sapiens, have never been entirely “natural” nor have they been totally at the mercy of “nature.”  All along humankind’s long career we have been cyborgs of sorts interacting with our environment by means of tools of increasing sophistication and destructiveness, and, in the process, transforming our very selves.  Bio-technology is such a fascinating notion precisely because of the literalness with which it brings together the two realms--that of biology, of that which is thought to be inscribed in nature, and that of culture, understood as the expression of human creativity in society.  Western common sense, at least since Descartes, has usually kept the two realms conceptually apart, as if they were evidently distinct and separable dimensions of the human condition.  The nature versus culture controversy is, moreover, highly charged emotionally and politically because nature and culture have not only tended to be seen as clearly distinct and separable but also as conflicting, rather than complementary, forces in modern Western cosmology.  In spite of the close and indissoluble interaction of biological and cultural determinants in shaping human behavior, political attitudes and scientific interests have endowed both terms and their interrelationship with historically particular socio-symbolic meanings.  This is so because of the modern liberal association of nature with destiny, on the one hand, and individual freedom and choice with humans’ capacity for cultural creativity and change, on the other.  Cloning, as yet another dramatic change of the “facts of life,” illustrates the historicity of ontology, without denying the materiality of these “facts.”  But if descriptions of reality--such as the nature-culture dualism--are historical, this raises the epistemological question of how to account for physical materialities without neglecting their cultural embeddedness and vice-versa.

The dissociation of culture from nature is extraordinarily productive for science because it allows the “hybrid” intersecting zones to remain unquestioned and unchallenged.  Cloning is a privileged example of such a “hybrid” zone.  The proliferation of this sort of “hybrid” of culture and nature is a characteristic of modernity precisely because modernity distinguishes nature and culture as ontologically distinct and hierarchically ordered domains (Latour 1997:20-21).

Cloning, as a new form of reproduction, has thus been accomplished by human technical intervention and therefore blurs, in a peculiar way, this conventional dissociation between what is “artificial”--that is, cultural--and what is “natural” (Kalka 1997:2).  But the technological know-how that has emerged out of molecular biology, Fox Keller notes, has done more than change our sense of the immutability of “nature.”  Nowadays there are even those who claim that, owing precisely to the remarkable progress of molecular biology, the old controversy over nature versus culture has finally been laid to rest--with “nature” emerging victorious (Fox Keller 1992:288, 282)!  

Nevertheless, the nature-culture dichotomy was employed as an argumentative weapon in the controversy prompted by the prospect of human reproductive cloning.  Those scientists who opposed a ban on cloning in humans disagreed emphatically that human identity was genetically predetermined in their attempt to discredit the advocates of a ban.  The latter, in turn, went out of their way to underline prevailing genetic determinist convictions to justify their alarm over human cloning (Mario 1997:1-6; Newman 1997:488).[11]

When I was gathering information on reproductive and therapeutic cloning I was struck both by the renewed influence that the nature-culture dualism is exerting on the contemporary generation of knowledge and by the economic power and ideological prominence of bio-genetics.  This influence deepens, if possible, the opposition between cultural knowledge and science.  It is as if during the past fifty years molecular biologists and social and political scientists had come to inhabit separate and distant planets, barely talking to each other, and, therefore, incapable of identifying the big issues of the day in their full magnitude (Borofky 1999:14).  Molecular biologists seek to unlock the secrets of the human DNA taken to be the blueprint for all life, while socio-cultural anthropologists are engaged in cultural critique and politics of difference (Stolcke 1995).

This renewed dissociation between the life sciences and the social sciences dates back at least to mid century.  In the aftermath of the second great war, a clear demarcation line was drawn between biology and culture, such that human behaviour was now seen to be shaped by culture.  This occurred in reaction to the deadly horrors perpetrated by the Nazis in the name of race science and to forestall any future misuse of the life sciences for distorted ideological and political purposes.  One consequence was the programmatic divorce between science and humanities.  This separation did not prevent determinisms in various guises to raise their ugly heads again.  But of relevance here is the progressive fragmentation of knowledge which impedes a holist view of the human experience and makes it more difficult to go beyond general disparagements to challenge these determinisms effectively.  Almost simultaneously as the science and humanities moved apart, the life sciences--especially molecular biology--expanded notably, and central analytical categories such as “race” were reinstated as an ontological reality (Fox Keller 1992:297; Haraway 1988; Provine 1973, 1986; UNESCO 1953).

Watson, Crick and Franklin's discovery in 1953 of the structure of DNA brought new energy to persistent genetic determinism in the form of a theory of life circumscribed to the gene.  In the following decades this theory evolved into a thoroughly molecular form of mechanicist genetic determinism.  Biology entered a phase in which the gene was glorified, even though dissident voices could be heard and there were signs of the beginnings of an epigenic revolution (Strohman 1997; Goodman and Armelagos 1998; Jacob 1982; Lewontin 1993).[12]  As Watson declared almost four decades after having identified the double helix, “We used to think our fate was in the stars, now we know, in large measure, it is in our genes” (Watson 1989).

The separate organization of fields of knowledge, deepening academic specialization, reciprocal distrust, disciplinary boundary disputes, and competition for scarce resources in a technocratic socio-economic age, have thus engendered a severely fragmented image of the world not unlike a broken mirror.  Although the fragments of the mirror can only reflect partial and distorted sights, these tend nonetheless to be taken for the measure of the whole thing.  As a consequence it has become almost impossible to envisage the human experience as an ever unfolding totality.  Monist reductionisms, be they bio-genetic or culturalist, flourish instead.  While in the life sciences, as the science journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe noted, genetic determinism has become the dominant paradigm, in the social sciences analyses of the contemporary globalized and fragmented world are increasingly beset by scientific scepticism and cultural relativism (Wolfe 1996).  In the social sciences the crisis of the great modern universalist liberal, humanist and Marxist narratives has created profound doubts about the very possibility of objective knowledge, which has been replaced by the postmodern pursuit of fragments of cultural meaning.  As social anthropology has become a humanist and moral discipline concerned with human intent and responsibility, there is a difficulty in acknowledging biological phenomena since they seem to threaten assumptions about contextualized meanings and accountability (Littlewood 1997:7).

Yet, the claims of interpretative anthropology in the post-Geertzian style and of deconstruction influenced by French post-structuralists are not exempt from Cartesian dualist implications, because they assume rather than contest the prevailing opposition between cultural knowledge and science.[13]  The interpretative claim that human experience is culturally and/or discursively constituted is, in fact, only possible because “nature” continues to be implicitly assumed as a domain that is separate and separable from the cultural.  In his proposal for a new “symmetric anthropology”--which, instead of supposing a given order between nature and culture, would scrutinize diverse magnitudes of their mobilization in historical contexts--Latour put this state of affairs succinctly: “the very notion of culture is an artifact created by our bracketing of nature” (Latour 1997:140; Descola 1996; Viveiros de Castro 1998; Escobar 1999).

Even though, as an object of contemplation, or of experimentation and knowledge, “nature” is now recognizable as irretrievably social, this nevertheless leaves the crucial question of how to conceive of the materiality, the solidity, for instance, of changed “facts of life” and especially of asexual reproduction.  In order to appreciate the social and ideological dangers and potentialities of cloning we need to take into account this materiality, without, however, losing sight of the fact that people's perceptions and cultural meanings introduce a significant element of contingency (Harding 1993:10; Latour 1997).

A number of scholars have challenged in recent years the nature culture dichotomy and addressed the thorny problem of how to reconcile awareness of materiality with its invariable socio-cultural embeddedness.  Yet it is far easier to find fault than develop an alternative approach (Strathern 1992; Fox Keller 1990; Butler 1993).  Butler is a prominent and vocal instance but even she has not succeeded in offering a dynamic though integrated, non-determinist account of bodily materiality and cultural meanings (Costera Meijer and Prins 1998).  Haraway's rejection of the very dichotomy between nature and culture in her endeavour to design a productive politics of the generation of knowledge strikes me as more promising.  Haraway has attempted to bridge the tense opposition in contemporary feminist and general theory building between a radically constructivist view of all knowledge as invariably the result of manoeuvres of power and feminist critical empiricism which aims at more objective demystifications of the “real world.”  She thus pursues a more objective science, at the same time that she is exquisitely aware of irreducible differences and multiple local knowledges (Haraway 1991).

As a biotechnology, cloning is an exemplary instance of a kind of biological-discursive double-take.  Cloning is the sensational material accomplishment of a universalist doctrine—namely, genetic determinism underpinned by Cartesian dualism  born of concrete socio-historical circumstances.  Although disputed in its ultimate scientific claims, this doctrine has enabled a novel form of reproduction that works--making sex and sperm superfluous in procreation of mammals--but with as yet unforeseeable gendered and political-social consequences.  Biotechnology ought therefore to be subjected to critical examination not only for its mistakes of judgement or its theoretical fallacies but equally because of its undeniable material accomplishments--the human consequences which need to be properly appreciated.

The culture of material reason: a passion for genetic descent

Molecular biology, embryology and biotechnology have a scientific but also a cultural history which are intertwined (Fox Keller 1992:283).  History not only demonstrates that what can technically be done will usually be done.  To go back over the evolution of embryology and biotechnology is equally instructive because it reveals the cultural impulses behind evolving molecular biological research and puts into perspective what the radical recasting of the traditional procedure of conception in cloning may entail for our conceptions of conception and for gender relations.  Finally, this intersecting story discloses also the scientific and socio-cultural driving forces that are behind directions taken in reproductive medicine and thus provide fascinating testimony of the modern scientific endeavour ultimately to defeat human mortality in a culturally specific sense.

Initial opposition to human cloning soon gave way to weighty “exceptions” comprising reproductive assistance and stem cell therapy.  As the media uproar over Dolly's creation subsided, there remained--from among the multitude of more or less phantasmagoric scenarios--one serious consideration deserving of attention.  The science journal Nature. Biotechnology, for example, made a point of underlining the “apparently more realistic debates on infertility”--that is, the debates about and hopes placed in the possibility that cloning might cure certain types of infertility in humans (Anonymous 1997g:293).

The National Bioethics Advisory Commission that President Clinton had convened to draw up policy recommendations on human cloning heard a wide range of views--from calls to treat human cloning as simply another form of assisted conception to “grave concern” from animal rights activists.  Advisors were generally cautious and believed that, for the time being, human cloning was “morally unacceptable.”  But one ethicist chose to differ and argued that a ban on cloning would infringe scientific and reproductive freedoms that are protected by the U.S. constitution: “cloning should receive the same protection as other non-coital methods of assisted reproduction” (Wadman 1997:204; Anonymous 1997d:26).  In the end, the Commission proposed that cloning in humans for implantation be banned precisely because “the history of infertility treatment--especially of in-vitro fertilization--demonstrated that where there is a sizeable and well financed demand for a novel service, there will be professionals willing to try to provide it” (Wadman 1997:644).[14]

The United States possesses a flourishing and expanding private assisted fertility industry that is exempt from government regulation, that has an obvious vested interest in providing an ever larger range of choice in reproductive services, and that needs to be reckoned with as an influential lobby for reproductive cloning.  With an annual revenue of US$2 billion, it serves an estimated one of six American couples who are infertile.  This situation contrasts with the United Kingdom, for example, where a licensing authority was established and opinion about assisted fertilization appears to have become more sceptical (ISLAT Working Group 1998:651-2).

Since human embryo stem cells were cloned successfully, biomedical researchers have also been accelerating nuclear replacement technology in the expectation of advancing knowledge not only of the origins of cancer but also of other cellular processes such as ageing (Wilmut 1998).  In early January of 1999, the Geron Corporation of California announced the discovery of a technique to obtain “immortal” cells, which divide indefinitely and could be employed to replace ordinary mortal stem cells of tissues before they decay thereby ensuring permanent cell regeneration and hence eternal life (Wade 1999:34)!

Reproductive cloning (the cloning of whole organisms) and therapeutic cloning (for pharmaceutical purposes and for the production of tissues and organs for transplant) share much more than nuclear replacement.  Not only are they part and parcel of the same biotechnological endeavour but both techniques appeal in their own ways to the same dreams of genetic enhancement, perpetuation and ultimately immortality, but immortality in a strictly bio-genetic sense.

Contemporary molecular biology is not alone in being inspired by the conviction that humans’ destiny is in the genes.  Similar biological assumptions run through modern Western notions of selfhood and hence of procreation, of parenthood and kin relatedness, no less than of death.  They therefore form a powerful conceptual backdrop of the cloning craze in more than one sense.

To envisage these modern Western reproductive assumptions it is useful to go back some two hundred years.  Man's dream to create life and defeat death is an old but also a very modern one (Stolcke 1988).  In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, natural philosophy was expected to reveal the laws governing the order of nature and society.  Since the early twentieth century, scientists have been seeking the key to unlock human genetics in pursuit of the blueprint for what makes us human.

Until the 1950s, extrauterine fertilization in humans--a technical prerequisite for embryological experimentation at the service of molecular biological research--belonged to the world of fantasy.  Already in the 1770s the Italian physician Spallanzani had shown that contact between seminal fluid and the egg was essential for fertilization to take place.  Shortly thereafter Spallanzani successfully inseminated a bitch.  The actual penetration of the egg by the spermatozoa was not discovered, however, until 1879.  Given the simplicity of artificial insemination--consisting in depositing the semen of a man in the vagina of a woman--it comes as no surprise that the first successful attempt in humans also dates back exactly 200 years.  In 1799, in England, Hunter achieved the first successful artificial insemination of a woman with semen of her husband, a feat replicated by Thouret in France in 1804.  And Pancoast, in the United States, carried out the first insemination of a woman with donor semen in 1884 in a case in which the husband was azoospermic.  Thus, over the course of just two centuries, biotechnological know-how evolved from the encounter of the egg with the sperm to the sperms' demise in cloning.

Critics of cloning frequently allude either to Mary Shelley's famous dystopia, Frankenstein--the fable of a scientist who, by usurping the right to generate life, ends up creating a nameless man-monster--or to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as parables of the mysterious and uncontrollable dangers of a science devoid of moral responsibility.  More pertinent and prophetic, however, are the eugenic utopias of two distinguished scientists--the British biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, and the U. S. biologist, H. J. Muller, who was famous for his very early researches into the nature of the gene and who won the Nobel prize in medicine just after World War II.  Their works offer more authentic anticipations of the future.

In 1923 Haldane published Daedalus, a utopian description of a superior society achieved by selective eugenic breeding of children through ectogenesis:

Now that the technique (of ectogenesis) is fully developed, we can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air. (Haldane 1923:64)

J. B. S. Haldane used the term “clone” in 1963 to describe the cloning in the 1960s of sexually mature frogs from intestinal cells of adult frogs by John Gurdon (Wertz 1998; Gurdon 1962).[15]

A little after Haldane, in 1936, Muller wrote Out of the Night: A Biologist's View of the Future, another eugenic utopia foreshadowing a “brave new world” peopled by a supremely intelligent and cooperative race.  Artificial insemination, the culture and storage of sperm from great men (his heroes were Lenin, Newton, da Vinci, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar Khayyam, Pushkin, San Yat Sen, and Marx), the recovery of eggs for extrauterine fertilization, embryo transfer, and sex selection to eliminate genetic defects and determine the sex ratio at the service of the new science of eugenics all would be employed to abolish social classes by improving humans’ intellectual and moral qualities.  Muller was convinced, as it turned out rightly, that “. . . all this is no idle dream.  It not only certainly can be done--I believe it certainly will be done” (Muller 1936:145-55).

Muller defended the liberation of women from the “martyrdom” of involuntary motherhood but had no doubts about instrumentalizing women in the service of his eugenic dream.  By contrast, selective breeding by means of cloning--which would have meant dispensing with sexual reproduction and male participation in conception--never occurred to either Haldane or Muller, although it would certainly have offered a quicker way to achieve their eugenic projects.

Haldane and Muller shared their enthusiasm for eugenics with most of their contemporaries but they were no laissez-faire social Darwinists.  On the contrary, they proposed eugenic breeding by manipulating human heredity as a path to general social betterment.  It is a sign of their left politics that both Haldane and Muller actively participated as volunteers in the Spanish Civil war on the Republican side.  Symptomatic of the breadth and depth of eugenic convictions at the time, Muller authored a “Geneticists' Manifesto” (signed by twenty-two fellow scholars), which called for selective breeding as late as 1939, when the Nazi race doctrine and their deadly eugenic program was already public knowledge.  Eventually, Muller did condemn the fascist use of genetics without, however, ever questioning the determinist and elitist premises of his theory (Fox Keller 1992:283-4).[16]

In-vitro fertilization, the same as earlier artificial inseminations, was first and foremost intended as a cure for infertility in man.  In-vitro fertilization began to be developed in the 1930s although research using human eggs advanced slowly because eggs were hard to retrieve (Rudich 1999).  But in the 1960s experimentation with in-vitro fertilization of female eggs received new impetus and in 1978 the British scientists Steptoe and Edwards brought to the world the first baby conceived by in-vitro fertilization and embryo transfer.  This was a singular moment in human evolution--crowning scientists' endeavours to bring female eggs out of the darkness of the womb into the light of day and offering infertile parents the biotechnological gift of a child of “their own flesh and blood.”  The logic of eugenics and the cultural driving force of what has come to be benevolently known as “assisted conception” has been the singularly Western idea of descent understood to be essentially biological.  Since then, an estimated 250,000 children have been born by assisted conception.

New Genetic Fatherhood

A wise old anthropologist friend once pointed out to me quite rightly that it is fatherhood rather than motherhood which constitutes the crux of kinship.  We will probably never know what our distant forebears thought of having sex and procreating.  In a socio-cultural context such as ours, however, in which selfhood is understood to be so heavily determined bio-genetically, fatherhood indeed poses special problems.

In-vitro fertilization emerged, then, as a conjuncture of bio-geneticists’ ambitions, the belief in the power of genes, techno-scientific innovation, and the assumed hopes and desires of the public.  Artificial insemination and in-vitro fertilization responded to socio-cultural demand, the desire for biological parenthood, and especially fatherhood, by means of technological motherhood.  The British Warnock Report on the social, legal and ethical implications of the new reproductive technologies made the nature of this desire quite explicit:Childlessness can be a source of stress even to those who have deliberately chosen it. . . . In addition to social pressure to have children there is, for many, a powerful urge to perpetuate their genes through a new generation.  This desire cannot be assuaged by adoption. (Warnock 1984:8-9, emphasis added)

But which are the roots of this “powerful urge to perpetuate one's genes?” Could this urge be equally in our genes?  Lee Silver, who, in his much acclaimed book Remaking Eden, advocates what he provocatively denominates “reprogenetics”--the combination of technologies used in reproductive biology and genetics for gene therapy and genetic enhancement--is one of the recent defenders of a sort of exclusive genetic individualism in the form of a parental instinct.  In his book, Silver rehearses the familiar and controversial socio-biological thesis that the desire to have one's very own child is a natural instinct of evolutionary advantage:

The desire to bear and bring up a son [sic] is such a powerful drive that many people who experience it need a long time to explain its origin.  But its origin is evident for those who are familiar with Dobzhansky’s statement that “Nothing makes sense in biology if not in the light of evolution.”  And in this light the origin of this desire is easy to see.  It emerges directly from one of the guiding principles of evolution: the genes which program individuals so as to produce more in their own reproduction will be transmitted with progressively greater frequency from one generation to the next, and will finally spread through the whole population. (Silver 1998:102-103)[17]

Anthropologists have, of course, shown that, because sociobiology denies culture as a symbolic creation and reduces it to nature, it is completely unable to specify the cultural properties of human behavior in their variations between groups (Sahlins 1972).  Anthropologists have similarly demystified bio-genealogical assumptions on kin relatedness for what they are--namely, cultural notions typical of Western society--by demonstrating the enormous historical and cultural variability in motivations to procreate, in the intensity of those motivations, and in the meanings of maternity and paternity in association with varying conceptions of conception (Schneider 1972, 1984; Delaney 1986, 1991).  Values, attitudes and socio-cultural meanings which vary greatly in time and space cannot very well be genetically programmed.  Silver is aware that choice shapes reproduction in humans.  But if, as he acknowledges, despite their genetic programming, humans have developed the ability to act against their “better” instincts, then genetic programming is a poor explanation for the supposedly universal desire to have one’s own children (Silver 1997:103-104).

What is handled in the biotech lab is disembodied reproductive stuff--eggs, sperm, embryos--but these manipulations are charged with socio-cultural meanings and effects in emerging social relationships.  There are, in addition, linkages between linkages: linkages between relations created in the realm of “natural” facts and those “social” bonds engendered together with their symbolic emphases and meanings (Strathern 1993).  It is this “double-bind” of sex in procreation which is mobilized by cloning.

It may appear at first glance that because infertility historically has been considered a female “pathology” and women and their bodies are the prime objects of bio-medical manipulation in assisted conception, reproductive technologies were designed to cure female infertility.  This is an error of interpretation which I initially committed myself (Stolcke 1988).  As I indicated above, assisted conception was, in actual fact, intended to cure male infertility from the start and has only now become equally useful for women because it permits cheating the biological clock (Rudich 1999).

But because the “facts of life,” science, and culture are linked in an unstable way (Latour 1997), the bio-technological satisfaction of the desire to perpetuate oneself through children of one's own and the quest for bio-genetic immortality by means of extrauterine fertilization have posed very symptomatic and unexpected socio-cultural paradoxes--for “authentic” fatherhood, in particular.  Third, forth or fifth parties may now participate in an act of fertilization.  In-vitro conception, in effect, may end up challenging the conventional biological ideal of fatherhood and/or motherhood which, in principle, it was applied to sustain.  There is little, though socio-biologically significant, difference between fatherhood and motherhood.  Surrogate motherhood has provoked disputes between the women involved.  The litigation over the rightful mother of Baby M in the United States is a famous example made possible because the biological participation of both women in the process of engendering the child could hardly be disguised.  But when a foetus is created with donated semen, eggs, or embryos, or is carried to maturity in the womb of a surrogate mother, an explicit convention is required to ascertain fatherhood.  Entrenched bio-genealogical cultural assumptions coupled with contraceptive and conceptive technologies, have made the status of men as fathers more uncertain compared to women’s reproductive empowerment, even though this empowerment may come with a vengeance.  Male reproductive uncertainty probably contributes to the much noted contemporary crisis of masculinity (Badinter 1993).[18]

While, with in-vitro fertilization, motherhood has been bio-medically “naturalized,” fatherhood has become potentially more “artificial” and fragile.  It should not therefore come as a surprise that the vast juridical literature on assisted fertilization by donor focuses--beside the doctor's responsibility--mainly on the father-child bond, the child’s legitimacy and rights, and the legal status of the donor.  Since these bonds appear to be “contra-natura” they require positive law to be normalized socially.  The Spanish professor of law, Balcells Gorina, member of the Catholic lay organization Opus Dei, was only expressing prevailing ideals of fatherhood when he argued in 1980 that “Sperm banks mean a real dehumanization of paternity” and rejected heterologous insemination--fertilization of a woman with the semen of a male donor who is not her husband--because it constitutes adultery (Balcells Gorina 1980, emphasis added)! The concern to protect fatherhood has followers also among jurists and the State for, as one jurist warned, in-vitro fertilization provided women with “a socially adequate instrument to dislodge the husband” (Balz 1980:21-22).

Since male infertility was the motive for the development of assisted conception it is to be expected that biotechnology would also succeed in finding a remedy for the unforeseen consequences of paternal dislodgement and vulnerability caused by in-vitro fertilization.  In effect, since the birth of the first test tube baby, Louise Brown, in 1978 artificial conception made great strides especially in assisted biological fatherhood.  In 1992 a group of Belgian scientists reported the fertilization of a human egg with a single sperm by direct injection under the microscope, followed by the reinsertion of the egg into the woman’s uterus.  This new technique called ICSI (intra-cytoplasmatic sperm injection) quickly became very popular.  Over 5000 ICSI babies have already been born since 1992 (Djerassi 1999:2).  And in February of 1997 a baby girl was conceived by means of a combination of ICSI with a further pioneering technique: the freezing of eggs and their insemination by injecting sperm into the oocyte's cytoplasm (Anonymous 1997a).  ICSI allows men whose sperm are abnormal, and even those who are incapable of producing mature sperm at all, to procreate.  Until the advent of ICSI the insemination of the woman with donated sperm was the only option available to couples in order to procreate when the male partner was sterile owing to low sperm quality or levels.[19]  The introduction and enthusiastic social acceptance of ICSI before experimental evidence of its safety was available, was due to the desire to provide men with “their own” biological offspring. As the French geneticist and member of the Comité Consultif National d'Ethique Axel Kahn, has pointed out, there is currently a

strong social and psychological trend towards a fanatical desire for individuals not simply to have children but to ensure that these children also carry their genes, even when faced with the obstacle of sterility (or death) . . . today's society is characterized by an increasing demand for biological inheritance, as if this were the only form of inheritance worthy of the name.  One reason is that, regrettably, a person’s personality is increasingly perceived as being largely determined by his or her genes. (Kahn 1997:2)

This fanatical desire to have biological descendants, sharpened by the renewed confidence in the genetic basis of identity and behaviour, could, moreover, become a powerful driving force to condone cloning in humans, Kahn cautioned, by enabling a technique to cure severe forms of sterility in men such as dysplasia or testicular atrophy.  As he notes,

Applying the technique used by Wilmut et al. in sheep directly to humans would yield a clone “of the father” and not a shared descendant of both the father and the mother.  Nevertheless, for a woman the act of carrying a foetus can be as important as being its biological mother.  The extraordinary power of such “maternal appropriation” of the embryo can be seen from the strong demand for pregnancies in post-menopausal women, and for embryo and oocyte donations to circumvent female sterility.  Moreover, if cloning techniques were ever to be used, the mother would be contributing something --her mitochondrial genome.  This suggests that we probably cannot exclude the possibility that the current direction of public opinion will tend to legitimize the resort to cloning techniques in cases, where, for example, the male partner in a couple is unable to produce any gametes. (Kahn 1997:2-3, emphasis added)

Two years after Axel Kahn’s warning, the new Spanish Informe sobre Clonación. En las Fronteras de la Vida defined reproductive cloning simply as “a technique of assisted conception, for example, to cure infertility.”  Displaying admirable euphemistic skills, the report argued that

In this context, the aim of this technique would not be so much the gestation of an individual identical to a progenitor but a chance to help a couple to conceive.  In this manner, nuclear transfer can be envisaged as a “non conventional” method of fertilization (Fundación de Ciencias de la Salud 1999:59)

The biotechnological and infertility industries’ vested interests in reproductive cloning and the scientific community’s affinity with the industrial-medical establishment is undeniable as the liberal recommendations of the Committee of Experts on Bioethics and Cloning, which authored the Report, shows:

National public authorities as well as the competent supra- and international authorities should not overlook the future possibility of eliminating the ban on reproductive cloning as a procedure to be used in combating infertility in the couple and the transmission of hereditary diseases to their descendants, once the reserves on the safety of these techniques have been overcome. (Fundación de Ciencias de la Salud 1999:264)

Scientists are in the habit of taking for granted public interest in and approval of the progress of science without usually enquiring into public opinion.  While the scientific community along with the media have provided an unending stream of opinion on cloning little is known about public attitudes toward cloning although the little that is known is intriguing.

The demand for ICSI and in-vitro fertilization is proof of a real social demand for the older reproductive technologies.  Two systematic studies of public opinion on cloning--one for Britain and another one for Spain--are now available and reveal, by contrast, widespread scepticism and distrust on the part of the respective populations toward bio-genetic research and cloning, in particular (The Wellcome Trust 1998; Fundación de Ciencias de la Salud 1999).

The Medicine and Society program of The Wellcome Trust of Britain conducted empirical research in 1998 to contrast assumptions about attitudes toward human cloning with actual popular opinions (The Wellcome Trust 1998).  The Informe sobre Clonación contains a careful assessment of the historical, technical, ethical and juridical dimensions of cloning and an in-depth analysis of public attitudes in Spain (Fundación de Ciencias de la Salud 1999:67-126).

Both studies coincide on the general moral rejection by the population of human cloning and their distrust of medical experimentation, an attitude which had already been noted in Spain in the late 1997s (Peregil 1997:26).  Cloning finds better acceptance by the Spanish public only as a last biotechnological resort in the case of infertile couples who want to have children of their own (Fundación de Ciencias de la Salud 1999:117).  Attitudes toward the fact that cloning dispenses with “pleasure and sperm” were unfortunately not investigated.  The reason why the Spanish population is so strongly opposed to reproductive cloning is sought in a kind of Frankenstein syndrome, an atavistic fear that scientists might produce monsters.

The Wellcome Trust’s study focuses exclusively on public opinion on cloning.  While reproductive cloning is shown to be at the front of people's minds, those interviewed associated cloning closely and negatively with “genetic engineering,” which awakens memories of Nazi atrocities, and hence is thought to be unacceptable.  As François Jacob had anticipated, cloning is deemed disruptive of family relationships.  People’s distrust of genetic manipulation contrasts with their technical ignorance about the procedure and their lack of awareness that cloning dispenses with sexual conception.  By contrast with the scientific community and at least part of the infertility lobby’s awareness of the potential reproductive uses of cloning, the people studied were quite incapable of imagining anything of that sort.  The realization that no sperm was involved in cloning came as quite a shock for a number of them: “I'm getting totally confused here--what about men--how can you have a baby without men” one woman wondered.  Another woman asked herself how it would be “growing up and being told that actually you did not have a father at all, genetically.”  Fatherhood is thought to be in a man’s sperm and it is this which ultimately creates a kin bond in the act of begetting.  This “seminal” image of fatherhood turned out to be so powerful that it prevented not only the men interviewed but also the researchers from contemplating cloning as an infertility cure for men.  The man were neither asked nor did they react to what one woman jokingly called “male redundancy.”  Men refused to take a personal stand and, instead, commented about the broader issue of technical progress, showing no interest in procreative matters which were mainly women's concern.  Yet, neither infertile women nor those who had lost a child considered making use of cloning either (The Wellcome Trust 1998:16-18, 41).[20]

As limited as the findings of these studies of public opinion may be, they nonetheless suggest a few significant points.  Reproductive cloning adds a new dimension to potential biotechnologically produced kin bonds.  For the time being, however, the familiar Western bio-genealogical conception of conception coupled with a “seminal” ideal of fatherhood make asexual reproduction and hence reproductive cloning, at least in Britain, and to a slightly lesser degree in Spain, inconceivable in humans.  Reproductive cloning as a technique capable of producing individuals who are genetically almost identical with their progenitors--the cell nucleus donors--as the non plus ultra of biological relatedness, enters into conflict with familiar sexual notions of conception and relatedness.  Hence, reproductive cloning as a cure for infertility is for the moment unimaginable for the public.  An added reason in Spain for rejecting cloning in humans is a widely shared concern for the protection of the environment and “nature” (Fundación de Ciencias de la Salud 1999:109-12).  History will show how these conceptual and value tensions will be dealt with after the likely advent of human cloning.

From social order to individual disorders

Historically, the cultural conception of descent as a bio-genealogical bond and the powerful desire for genetic fatherhood and motherhood requires an explanation.  The fanatical desire for genetic parenthood to which Axel Kahn alluded appears to be at odds, at first glance, with the modern Western notion of the subject and the dream of Man's emancipation from the constraints of nature.  Paradoxically, however, these bio-genealogical ideals and convictions, which sound familiarly eugenic, form a part of modernity.  The kinship imagery of bonds of blood, recently replaced by the power of genes, is the reproductive expression, as I have argued elsewhere, of a very modern ideological tension that runs through Western society's self-understanding.  The tension between bio-genealogical notions of kin and procreation and the ideal of individual self-determination is one manifestation of the contradiction between the liberal humanist ethics of personal autonomy and individual choice and the ascription of individuals' social placement to innate endowment and hence heredity.  This tension is also reflected in the Cartesian dichotomy between the body and the mind, or nature and culture, in which the modern subject appears to be caught.

By the eighteenth century, natural philosophy had inspired scholars to search for the laws of nature that would account for the order in nature and society.  From the Renaissance onward natural philosophy had progressively replaced theological-moral explanations and classifications of things in the world the Europeans knew.  This scientific naturalism became the context of the knowledge that informed man's endeavour to control nature, and it provided the rationale to reconcile the modern liberal ideal of the self-determining subject born equal and free with deepening socio-economic inequalities and new national boundaries by presenting them as being in the nature of things, thereby neutralizing them politically.  In the latter part of the nineteenth century, scientific doctrines such as social Darwinism, eugenics, and scientific racism served similarly to disguise the socio-economic roots of social and gender inequality and political exclusion (Stolcke 1993).  Goldberg has described this tension constitutive of modernity as “a central paradox, the irony perhaps of modernity: the more explicitly universal modernity's commitments, the more open it is and the more determined it is by the likes of racial specificity and racist exclusivity” (Goldberg 1993:4).

But the desire for personal perpetuation and genetic immortality with the aid of biotechnology, be it reproductive or therapeutic, suggests also an exacerbation of modern liberal individualism in contemporary Western society.  In the ideological climate of heightened individualism it is not surprising that individual identity and singularity should occupy a central place in the controversy over human cloning.  Richard Dawkins, the sociobiological author of The Selfish Gene, confessed his desire to be cloned because he thought that it would be “mind-boggingly fascinating to watch a younger edition of (himself) to grow up in the twenty-first century instead of the 1940s” (Butler and Wadman 1997:9).  And a German journalist, for example, asked Wilmut whether Dolly was not in a sense a reincarnation of the cloned adult ewe (Anonymous 1997f).  The question may have been a provocation but the journalist correctly identified one crucial ontological and ethical-legal problem cloning in humans is felt to pose namely what, exactly, a human being is.[21]  The French government, for example, feared that, when compelled by cloning to re-examine its bioethics law of 1994, it would face the ontological headache posed by human embryo stem cell cultivation: that is, how to re-conceptualize the human embryo--”as a potential human person” or as a “potentiality of a human person?” (“L’embryon et la loi” 1999).[22]

Pronounced individualism informs also a new individualist eugenics associated with a new notion of “genetic disease.”  The relatively recent concept of “genetic disease” as a central piece of therapeutic cloning and gene therapy provides an effective justification for the expansion of molecular genetics.  The category of “genetic disease” tends to confine individuals' ailments to personal genetic disorders, thereby dismissing environmental factors.  The medical sciences have appropriated this idea of “genetic disease” and suggested possibilities of diagnosis and cure, Fox Keller warns, far beyond the technical capabilities of molecular biology, at the same time that they have aroused individuals’ hopes vested, for example, in personal gene therapy (Fox Keller 1992:289, 291-293).  Classical eugenics, by contrast, were concerned with collective social reform and betterment through selective breeding.  Interference in human propagation consisted either in manipulating breeding to produce superior people or in a laissez-faire approach which counted on the “unfit” being naturally selected out by the “struggle for survival” (Kevles 1992).  Individual eugenics understands socio-biological improvement in individual genetic terms, a conception encouraged by an ideology of individual choice and performance in a socially highly fragmented and competitive first world, made apparently possible by biotechnology and genetic engineering.

Yet, the illusions of individual genetic amelioration entail new contradictions.  Biotechnological “progress” has made cloning feasible, and genetic individualism may make it more widely desirable.  On its own genetic terms, a clone of an individual is, however, not his/her offspring but twin!  Cloning may eventually appear as an attractive technique to replicate one's own cherished individual self.  Yet, the science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, daughter of Alfred Kroeber, years ago drew attention to how multiple cloning of the same cell may produce precisely the opposite, namely suppress any subjective capability for individuality (Le Guin 1968).  Another potential paradox may arise from the attribution of diseases to genetic disorders and the expectation that advanced gene therapy and genetic engineering may offer cures if only they advance sufficiently.  At the limit, genetic manipulation could end up defeating the hereditarianism on which biotechnological research is based, for we would end up being entirely undifferentiated genetically, a situation which would, moreover, be irreconcilable with our survival as a species.

When the geneticist Axel Kahn issued his warning about human cloning, he may not have foreseen the effect the latest accomplishment of cloning human embryo stem cells and the prospect of producing drugs, and tissues and organs for transplant would have in stealing the limelight from human reproductive cloning.  Yet, the early preoccupation over the ethical implications and deleterious effects of human cloning for genetic diversity, adaptability, and the survival of species appear now rather outdated as attention has shifted to therapeutic cloning, and gene therapy is publicised enthusiastically as a promise of a better and longer life for all.  “The myth of eternal youth will become a fact: old body cells will be replaced by new ones,” one of the large and respectable Spanish newspapers proclaimed in its glossy Sunday supplement (Bayo 1998:39-40, emphasis added).  In a wealthy society that can afford to deny death as a part of life, therapeutic cloning promises a cure for genetic diseases ranging from Altzheimer’s through cancer to ageing.  While the ageing first world pursues its biotechnological dreams of bearing perfect children on demand and of enjoying eternal youth, these are not and cannot, however, be priorities among the majority of the planet’s population whose most basic health needs are not even covered.  Tragically emblematic of this inequality is the international inequity in the medical treatment of AIDS.  Dr. Nivot’s warning in relation to the risks of cloning for bio-diversity in cattle breeding may serve as an ironical metaphor for growing exclusions: “it would still be necessary to breed rustic races so as to recover the old genes and carry out new miscegenations adapted to the market.  This is reassuring” (Duparq 1997).  It is quite obvious who would be assigned the role of procreating such “rustic races,” reserves of the good old genes, in humans.

Similar inequities also occur in the North.  As the biotechnological industrial complex attracts vast sums of public and private capital for biotechnological research in the wealthy North, their public health systems are being privatized so that the number of those who will be able to “chose” some of these new bio-genetic miracle treatments will decrease.  Medical resources for ordinary and inevitable “diseases,” like ageing--that is, for proper care for the aged--become ever scarcer.

A kingdom for an egg

With ICSI a single sperm is now enough for a man to have biological offspring.  But cloning could also become a tempting alternative for men with severe forms of sterility.  Women could, of course, choose to clone themselves as well.  In either case, cloning dispenses with sperm but women's bodies and, in particular, their eggs and wombs--be they donated or rented--become ever more indispensable.  Extrauterine fertilization was the necessary condition as well as the outcome of embryological experimentation at the service of molecular biological research.  As the research momentum speeds up, the need for female reproductive materials grows alarmingly.  While cloning displaces some aspects of reproduction like sexual conception, other preconditions of procreation like women’s bodies and eggs become, therefore, literally vital.

In-vitro fertilization was presented at the time of its introduction, in the 1970s and 1980s, as just another scientific-technological achievement in the culturally and sexually neutral quest to better serve human needs and desires.  Feminist scholars demonstrated that the privileged targets and objects of increased bio-medical experimentation and control of human procreation are women and their bodies.  When François Jacob quoted Diderot's Conversations with d'Alembert in his celebrated book of 1970, The Logic of Life—”Do you see this egg?  With it you can overthrow all the schools of theology, all the churches of the world”--he was alluding to the embryological centrality of the egg (Jacob 1973:v).  The foregrounding of females to the detriment of males is the combined effect of the very material species characteristic of sexual dimorphism and its socio-cultural influences shaping biotechnology.  As the possibilities and magnitude of technical intervention in human procreation are augmented, eggs are becoming the most valuable and sought-after reproductive substance because eggs constitute the limiting condition for molecular biological research and experimentation.[23]

Watson was, nonetheless, wrong when he prognosticated in 1971 that once they could be brought into the light of day human eggs would become a readily available commodity.  The real situation is the opposite.  Once human eggs have been transformed into disembodied commodities they are in very short supply.  That is the logic of the commodity on the market.  The price of human eggs not only expresses the medical complexity of their “recovery” from a womb, by contrast with the “recovery” of sperm, but also their scarcity in relation to growing demand.  In contrast with sperm, the demand for eggs is rising.  The accelerated momentum of molecular biological research and intense competition between assisted fertilization clinics and biotechnological laboratories, have made human eggs scarce and expensive.  Human oocytes have become proverbial “golden eggs,” a situation which contrasts with the surplus of stored and often “orphaned” embryos whose experimental manipulation is thought to pose serious ethical problems.[24]

As biotechnology expands so does the instrumentalization of female bodies.  Although for the time being cloning of humans “without pleasure and spermatozoa” is still beset with some technical and serious ethical and political dilemmas, it is most unlikely that molecular biological experimentation in humans will cease.  While awaiting further technical advances, fertility clinics in the United States, for example, contemplate the use of human embryo cloning as a new service in order to obtain a larger number of embryos for implantation in the case of infertile women over 40 who run a low risk of multiple births.  And in what is probably an “under”-estimate, approximately sixty women would be needed as guinea-pigs to achieve one human clone by the method employed in the creation of Dolly, not to mention the ethical issues involved in having to discard failures (Ruiz de Elvira and Bayón 1998:26).

Despite the culturally diverse symbolic meanings of motherhood and fatherhood, in strictly biological terms women have always been the limiting factor in the reproduction of humans as a species.  Cloning as a new asexual procedure of procreation dislodges men from conception while endowing female bodies and especially their eggs with heightened commodity value.  Yet, women’s enhanced biotechnological prominence as the privileged sites for reproductive experimentation, rather than being the source of new social value will, under prevailing gender and power structures, entail new forms of socio-medical manipulation and control.

Conclusion: the sex of biotechnology

Cloning of humans “without pleasure and without spermatozoa” may be beset with technical difficulties for some time but it will be done.[25]  Modern western bio-genealogical cultural ideals of individual reproduction and of bodily immortality coupled with sedimented eugenic convictions constitute a fertile ground for biotechnological advances.  Cloning transforms hitherto inevitable biological characteristics of the species by doing away with sexual reproduction and thus divesting sex difference of its earlier reproductive role by biotechnological means.  In cloning “culture” and “nature” intersect generating new biological facts which are situated in a socio-cultural context which is gendered and endows changed “facts of life” with new symbolic meanings.  This raises a final epistemological question, namely how to comprehend these sensational biotechnological innovations acknowledging the inevitable interplay between “nature” and “culture” in the human experience but carefully avoiding bio-genetic no less than cultural reductionism.  While sex difference was taken as a given of conception, anthropologists and feminists debated about its link with cultural notions of kin and gender.  Now that biotechnology poses the possibility of doing away with sexual conception, we may suddenly realize that sex difference mattered after all.

Phillips has noted the persistent difficulties in feminist theorizing involved in separating biological materiality and cultural constructs, sex and gender, without falling into the trap of materialist or constructivist reductionism, that is present in the endeavours to discern which difference in the last instance makes the gender difference:

It is one thing to argue for heterogeneity and diversity to be written into our theories of equality and justice; it is quite another to accept “the” difference and rearrange our thinking around that.  And one of the things this indicates to me is that, notwithstanding the conceptual difficulties feminists have raised around the distinction between sex and gender, we will continue to need some way of disentangling the differences that are inevitable from those that are chosen, and from those that are simply imposed. (Phillips 1992:23)

A spiral may be an appropriate image to depict this dialectical interplay between biological facts, their material transformations, and old and new cultural meanings.  Reproductive cloning constitutes one of the critical points where genetic determinism--which forms part of modern Western cosmology and society--converges with dominant cultural ideals of kin relatedness founded on sex difference as the assumed precondition for procreation.

Procreation “without pleasure and spermatozoa” is a biotechnological achievement inspired by a bio-genetic doctrine, which has transformed the hitherto inevitable “fact of life” of sexual reproduction in mammals by dislodging the male while transforming female bodies and eggs into the prime sites of procreation.  But the way in which this reproductive innovation is perceived or ignored, applied and employed, is a matter of socio-cultural choice shaped by prevailing reproductive symbolism and gender values.  This biological change of the culturally assumed preconditions for procreation will at some point challenge sexual and gender meanings precisely because of the fit that is assumed to exist between the conventional “facts of life” and the making of life.

The prominence of the female womb in Victorian representations of women's body--depicted as the vessel of the male's seed--pertained to the argument according to which women are governed and subjected by their “natural” procreative proclivities to the male-fathers as the embodiment of human reason (Poovey 1986:145).  The new biotechnological prominence of oocytes and the demise of the sperm=seed might appear to change this “powerful” sex-gendered imagery.  By dispensing with sexual conception and the sperm--in the context of a strongly individualist, genetically determinist, unequal, and gendered social environment--cloning could well convert women into the reproducers par excellence and thereby reinforce maternity as their foremost responsibility and destiny.  Yet, this apparent maternal empowerment might also have the contrary effect.  It could well lead to more extensive bio-medical control and new constraints imposed by potential fathers (Maalouf 1993).

It is in the nature of modern history, science, and biotechnology never to stand still.  Dolly opened the door for cloning research.  Since then nothing seems to stop scientists and the biotechnological industrial complex from pushing the frontiers of life ever further.  Cloning may provoke ethical and bio-medical reservations and alarm but the likelihood that these apprehensions may halt the biotechnological is tiny.[26]  Even so, a critical understanding of these scientific developments, the way they are disseminated, sold and bought, is a valuable tool with which to work in the present world.  Reports of unexpectedly fast and sustained biotechnological progress are only occasionally interlaced with some disappointing news.  The way achievements and, for that matter, failures are reported is often ironically significant in itself.  Dolly’s supposed premature ageing, for instance, provoked excitement in the scientific community.  The Washington Post almost simultaneous warned of the “serious health risk” involved in “[making] animals from a single parent,” concluding that “viable offspring” need two genetic parents (Weiss 1999:1, emphasis added)!  But there is, of course, much more good news.  Scientists at the University of Hawaii are said to have succeeded in cloning “A mouse, the first cloned macho” from the tail cell of another adult mouse, although this was technically possible all along (Ruiz de Elvira 1999)!

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[1] I thank the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for the opportunity to try out my ideas on cloning at the Symposium on “New Directions of Kinship Studies: A Core Concept Revisited” held in Mallorca in late March 1998. My thanks go also to Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, the organizers, for the fruitful controversy my paper provoked and their incisive comments. But I am especially grateful to Miguel Vale de Almeida for his thoughtful reaction.

[2] A series of experiments with cloning mammals have been carried out since the 1960s using mice, sheep, and cows.  But, until the creation of Dolly, in all instances undifferentiated cells were employed (Fundación de Ciencias de la Salud 1999:24-25).

[3] Thereafter followed in 1998 a mouse cloned from ovaric cells, several cows cloned from various types of differentiated cells, and, in 1999, a goat cloned from differentiated 40-day-old foetal cells (Fundación  de Ciencias de la Salud 1999:25).  As cloning has ceased to be a singular event, the beasts have become anonymous.

[4] Not only have huge sums been invested in the Human Genome Project aimed at identifying the complete genetic map of a human being, but its future benefits are incalculable.  The Human Genome Project was initially directed by James Watson.  The project operates with public and private funding and makes its findings available to the international scientific community.  Two of its early participants abandoned the project, however, and went into private business setting up two powerful genomic firms set to win this most costly race in the history of biology.  One dissident is William Haseltine who directs the large and aggressive firm Human Genome Sciences funded by the pharmaceutical giant Smith Kline Beecham.  The other is the prominent geneticist Craig Venter who directs the Genomic Research Institute financed by the multinational Parkin-Elmer (Sampedro 1998:33).  The United States’ 38% share in the decodification of the human genome outranks continental European participation in the Human Genome Project.  The British Sanger Centre works at deciphering 31% of the genome whereas France and Germany between them share 7%.  Lesser continental European participation in genomics research and biotechnology reflects different research traditions and historical sensibilities vis-à-vis genetic research and manipulation.  French biologists have resisted the scale and centralization of human genome research, and the French National Advisory Commission has been especially critical--for ethical reasons--of human reproductive cloning and has demanded a ban on human cloning and embryo research (Comité Consultif National d'Ethique 1997; Kevles 1992).

[5] European as well as Canadian cattle breeders rebelled angrily against the new biotechnology inaugurated by Dolly because “the technique is profitable for the large breeders.  The Americans who raise cattle by the millions. . . .”  Medium and small cattle breeders would, instead, become simple cowboys for the Americans (Duparcq 1997).

[6] Embryo splitting was declared ethically acceptable in the U.S. already in 1994, “provided that the resulting embryos are not damaged or destroyed in the process”--certainly an illusory condition to fulfill (quoted in Fundación de Ciencias de la Salud 1999:357).

[7] At the same time, several teams of scientists have been trying to splice human genes into pig cells in order to create an adult animal with organs for transplant that the human body would be less likely to reject (Pilling 1998).

[8] The European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies to the European Commission came out with an opinion in November 1998 on the funding of human embryo research.  While it acknowledged that research and medicine are governed by national laws, it recommended that--although funding should not a priori preclude human embryo research--no research should be financed that results in the destruction of the embryo (Fundación de Ciencias de la Salud 1999:336)--a subtle distinction if there ever was one.

[9] The ban was said to be a political reaction to public loss of confidence in genetically modified food.  It was received with anger in the scientific community.  A fertility expert, for instance, condemned the government’s decision as “pathetic” and “immoral” for having missed the chance to allow limited forms of cloning in order to save lives (Donelly 1999:1-2).

[10] The Wellcome Trust (1998:16).

[11] At some point doubts began to be raised, however, about whether Dolly was in reality genetically identical with her genetic mother since an organisms' genetic structure does not depend only on nuclear DNA but also on the mitochondria of the cytoplasm of the cells outside the nucleus and have their own DNA.  But the logic underlying this argument is the same (“Updating on cloning: 'Dolly' is not the same as her genetic mother” 1997; Kolata 1997).

[12] R. C. Lewontin is one of the distinguished critics of the genetic determinist paradigm.  Strohman, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Molecular Biology and Cells of the University of California, Berkeley, observed that there is a notable absence of correspondence between genetic and evolutionary change.  The interaction between DNA, proteins, and the determination of organic functions is far more complex than the gene theory presents, since, as the advocates of an epigenic theory maintain, a sort of feed-back occurs on account of the regulation of the genetic expression by the environment (Strohman 1997).

[13] This is an important point made by Daniel Segal at the Wenner-Gren symposium.

[14] Although scientists consulted by the European Union opposed human cloning for reproduction, they did not reject experimentation with embryos under sixteen days old as long as they were not implanted in a womb (Anonymous 1997d:26).  After a fine line was drawn around reproductive cloning so as to allow for the continuation of human embryo research that does not involve the creation of whole individuals, by July of 1999 a ban had been adopted on the cloning of complete humans in Spain, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, and Germany.  The U.S. Congress is expected to follow suit (Valverde 1999:96-97).

The “conceivers” of the first test tube babies were, of course, also approached to give their opinions about cloning.  Neither mentioned cloning as an infertility treatment. Robert Edwards thought that stem cells could be made available by means of cloning for the fabrication of organs for transplant in cases of disease or accident whereas the French scientist Jacques Testart was generally critical of the technique (Postel-Venay and Millet 1997:546).

[15] H. J. Webber used the term clon for the first time in Science 1903; C.L. Pollard changed the orthography to clone in Science, in 1905 (Silver 1997:373).  The first attempt at cloning appears to date back to 1938, when Hans Spemann of Germany proposed a “fantastical experiment” transferring a nucleus from a 16-cell salamander embryo to an enucleated egg to create an identical twin.  Robert Briggs and Thomas King of Philadelphia cloned tadpoles from early frog embryo cells by nuclear transfer in the late 1950s (Wertz 1998).

[16] Haldane and Muller are by no means exceptional.  Other scientists more recently shared their enthusiasm for planned human breeding.  William Shockley, who won the Nobel prize in physics in 1956, intended to create a sperm bank to breed children of other fellow Nobel prize winners.  In 1966, Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel prize winner in medicine, advocated cloning humans to “reproduce superior individuals.”  In 1974, Joseph Fletcher defended the creation of human clones specialized in certain tasks and MacFarlane Brunet, another Nobel prize winner in medicine, drew attention in a 1978 book to the great advantages that the systematic genetic selection of individuals would have (Postel-Venay and Millet 1997:545).

[17] The picture Silver draws of the dawn of this instinct is quaintly rational: “When our ancestors understood for the first time the connexion between sex and reproduction, a mother understood that her own son was the one she had born and the son of a father was the one conceived with the sperm he had deposited in the vagina of a woman” (Silver 1997:225).

[18] Rumors of declining sperm quality throw further light on a masculine apprehension typical of the wealthy countries (Perez Olive and Mediavila 1998).  Men in the United Kingdom now have available a saliva test at a price of 75,000 pesetas to determine--without the knowledge of their wives--whether they are the authentic fathers of their children (Ferrer 1998:20).

[19] So spectacular has been the reaction to ICSI that Carl Djerassi, the inventor of The Pill, has turned its development into a play--entitled The Immaculate Misconception—which was successfully staged in August 1998 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (http://www.dejarassi.com/icsi.html:1).  There are men, I am told by a colleague working in reproductive medicine, who are willing to undergo up to eight surgical interventions for the sake of extracting one single spermatozoa from their testicles.  In the meantime even more sophisticated techniques have become available to help men to perpetuate themselves.  Men who do not produce sperm nonetheless often possess spermatids in their testicles.  These can be recovered and their nuclei extracted to inject them into the oocytes' cytoplasm.  This method is called ROSNI (Round spermatid nucleus injection).  And those men who do not even have round spermatids may also soon have a chance.  A method has been developed to recover the most immature cells from the testicles so as to cultivate them in a surrogate testicle, perhaps of a pig or a bull, where they will differentiate and evolve into completely active spermatozoa (Silver 1997:105-108).  There also seem to exist technical possibilities now to mix genetic materials without sexual conception.  Last spring the Los Angeles Times carried the news that a West Hollywood gay couple was due to become parents of the world's first two-father child thanks to in-vitro technology.  Several eggs, obtained from the woman who was then carrying the child, were separately fertilized with sperm donated by both men.  The eggs were allowed to divide in vitro up to eight cells.  Two female embryos respectively fathered by each of the man were then fused forming a combined embryo. The outcome is what is called a mosaic child.  But I lack information about how this story ended.  I am thankful to Rosely Costa from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil, for this information.

[20] It is also significant in this respect that a letter published by the Human Cloning Foundation on its “official site in support of human cloning!” is from a husband who explains why his infertile wife with no viable eggs wants human reproductive cloning (http://www.humancloning.org:1-7).

[21] The moment at which human life is believed to begin was an important ethical-ontological issue in the debate over a ban on human embryo research, and over where the limit of biotechnological experimentation should be drawn to protect human dignity without, however, wiping out biomedical research (Coale 1997:1-2).  One widely endorsed solution was a taxonomic slight of hand distinguishing between “pre-embryos”--up to 14 days--and embryos.  This new classification has obviously little to do with ethical standards which are by definition absolute, but with scientific-economic interests.  Similarly striking conceptually is the very recent subdivision of cloning in the Spanish Informe sobre clonación. En las frontersa de la vida into three different procedures, only one of which was conceived as “true cloning.”  The report distinguishes between “artificial twinning” by embryo splicing, “para-cloning” by embryo or foetal nuclear transfer, and “true cloning” by adult cell nucleus transfer.  In the first two cases the offspring are identical among themselves but not with the progenitor, while only “true cloning” produces an individual almost identical with the cell nucleus donor (Fundación de Ciencias de la Salud 1999:57). 

[22] The famous prophet of the “end of history,” Francis Fukuyama, believes that not only have the past ten years proved him right on the supremacy of the market logic, but that in the next two centuries biotechnology will provide the tools to achieve what the social engineers of the past have failed to do, namely to abolish human beings as such.  “At that point we will have definitively ended human history. . . . A new post-human history will then begin” (Fukuyama 1999:17).

[23] Cattle breeding illustrates the heightened value of females.  Referring to cloning of cattle, Dr. Alain Nivot, head of the French laboratory Procrea FIV, insisted that “cattle breeders will need wombs, more so still than in in-vitro fertilization or the transfer of embryos, and therefore cows, but males will be no more than animals to be replicated, models which will be bought by the unit” (Duparq 1997).

[24] In Spain at the moment a human egg costs twenty times the price of a dose of sperm.  A dose of sperm is worth around 5,000 pesetas, while a human egg donation is worth around 100,000 pesetas. The latter price is justified as a compensation for the lengthy and medically complex procedure of bringing an egg to light.  But obviously it also has to do with commodification “ (Anonymous 1997e:10).  A woman who decides to donate eggs must visit the clinic twenty to thirty times and subject herself to hormonal stimulations, anestesia, etc. (Sampedro 1999:29).  Some researchers have turned to cows’ eggs which are plentiful (P. Cohen 1998).  In the U.S., experts in reproductive medicine have solicited a program for the adoption of stored embryos to reduce storage costs for the thousands of fertilized eggs without any use (“Científicos de EE UU abogan por la adopción de embriones” 1998:30).

[25] Scientists at Advanced Cell Technology of Massachusetts are said to have isolated the DNA-loaded nucleus of a cell of a skin sample from a man’s leg.  Then they transferred the nucleus to an enucleated cow’s egg.  The egg was “tricked” into beginning to divide like a newly-conceived embryo.  Theoretically it could have developed into a clone of the man from whom the cell was taken but--in line with U.S. research rules--it was destroyed before reaching 14 days (Taylor 1999:2.).

[26] In mid 1999, for instance, 67 Nobel prize winners published a letter in Science, in response to a motion by 70 Republican U.S. Congressmen who had demanded, unsuccessfully, a ban on human embryo research.  Robert Edwards--Louise Brown’s creator--has pleaded for human embryo cloning as an infertility treatment for couples who “really” cannot have children (Anonymous 1999a).