- Problems Posed with Cloning
http://www.worldwatch.org/press/news/2002/07/01
Excerpts from the authors of the “Beyond Cloning” issue of World Watch
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Invigorating Racism: “There are precedents for breeding that are politically manipulated. You only have to think of the Nazi German ideal, the blond blue-eyed German.” -Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize recipient in literature for 1991.
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Heightening Discrimination: “What is called a deficiency-mental, physical, or other-is socially defined. For example, the perverse world order of globalization dictated by commerce, greed, and profits regularly treats women, children, and poor people as inferiors. Without strong democracy and true transparency, this kind of discrimination can be used to justify human genetic manipulation, manifested in eugenics programs.” -Vandana Shiva, director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology, and author of Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply.
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Oh Brave New World: “Our new understanding of genomics and the neurosciences is almost making possible a generation of HyPE [human performance enhancement drugs] that could be used in more sinister ways, e.g., to control dissent.”-Pat Mooney, author of Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity, and executive director of ETC Group.
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Turning Babies into Commodities: “The story of an ‘enhanced’ humanity panders to some of the least attractive tendencies of our time: techno-scientific curiosity unbounded by care for social consequence, economic culture in which we cannot draw lines of any kind, hopes for our children wrought into consumerism, and deep denial of our own mortality.”-Tom Anthanasiou, author of Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor and Marcy Darnovsky, Associate Executive Director of the Center for Genetics and Society.
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Widening Economic and other Inequalities: “Genetic engineering … will artificially confer heritable advantages only on those who can afford to buy them.” -Judith Levine, author of My Enemy, My Love: Women, Men, and the Dilemma of Gender.
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The Law of Unintended Consequences: “…the attempt to master human nature through biotechnology will be even more dangerous and consequential than the efforts of industrial societies to master non-human nature through earlier generations of technologies.” -Francis Fukuyama, Bernard Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at The John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, author of The End of History and Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution.
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Destroying the Basis of Democracy: “The new eugenic technologies are being actively promoted by influential scientists, writers, and others who see themselves ushering in a new epoch for human life on earth. They speak with enthusiasm of a ‘post-human’ future in which the health, appearance, personality, cognitive ability, sensory capacity, and lifespan of our children have all been genetically modified. They anticipate, with scant concern, the inevitable segregation of humanity into genetic sub-species, the ‘GenRich’ and the ‘Naturals.’” -Richard Hayes, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society.
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Creating a New Terror Weapon: “It is this potential for genocide based on genetic differences, which I have termed ‘genetic genocide,’ that makes species-altering genetic engineering a potential weapon of mass destruction, and makes the unaccountable genetic engineer a potential bioterrorist.” -George J. Annas, Chair, Department of Health, Law, Bioethics and Human Rights, Boston University School of Public Health.
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