Page:Clones - Ryan Somma.pdf/7



Overcome by events.

All science fiction authors fear this eventuality. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote a short story about the first space explorer finding the voices of the dead in orbit around our planet, which is overcome by events. Jules Verne‘s "From the Earth to the Moon," where explorers reach our orbiting friend via a capsule shot from a cannon is overcome by events. The film "Le Voyage dans la lune," about a trip to a moon filled with wild aliens and monsters, is now overcome by events.

Yuri Gagarin‘s first trip into space and Neil Armstrong‘s first steps on the moon rendered all of these fictional works obsolete. Actual space flight transformed these works into mere novelty items. Their power to inspire speculation and innovation were lost because we had actually "been there" and "done that."

Within twenty years this book will be overcome by events. The stories I have written will become people‘s lives, more or less, as first the wealthy and then the middle class are able to clone themselves. Controversies will result, and society will change a little, just as it always does.

That cloning will become a safe medical procedure is inevitable. People can protest all they like and politicians can legislate all they want, but this will manifest itself in our lifetimes, and it simultaneously opens doors to opportunity, understanding, and misuse.

So we better look forward to the good news and prepare for the bad. How will cloning affect the familial architecture? How will clones be viewed in society? Will Cloning Clinics refuse services to certain people the way Fertilization Clinics withhold services to homosexual, physically challenged, and other demographics today? Should people have so much control over their children‘s designs? We‘ll see these disputations played out soon enough.

At the same time, what are we going to learn about ourselves from raising cloned children? Today researchers love to work with identical twins because they teach us so much about how our genes versus our environment shape who we are. With clones, we will have the opportunity as individuals to watch ourselves grow up, try to change ourselves, and see what could