Clone Being

Levick, Stephen E. Clone Being: Exploring the Psychological and Social Dimensions . Lanham, Maryland : Rowman and Littlefield , 2004 . £21.95 (pbk) xvi +317pp . ISBN 0-7425-2990-8 . Reproductive cloning is a topic that can inspire revulsion, conjuring up images of science-fiction horror and the creation of not-quite-humans. When the Raelians, a religious cult that believes humans were created by extra-terrestrials, claimed to have created a baby through cloning, they did nothing to make the prospect more mainstream. Against this background, Stephen E. Levick's book, Clone Being: Exploring the Psychological and Social Dimensions, appears remarkably restrained, almost prosaic, presenting the hypothesised clone in domestic circumstances. Levick, a psychiatrist, set out to imagine the personal consequences for someone conceived through somatic cell nuclear transfer: that is, by transferring someone's DNA from a body cell - such as a skin cell - into an egg from which the nucleus has been removed, and allowing it to develop into a baby. That baby would be genetically identical to the person whose DNA was used. Levick avoids the alarmist prose of science fiction in favour of more measured tones, but his book is redolent of the psychopathology brought to the psychiatrist's room. Clone Being comprises 12 chapters and an Introduction, with notes, references, and index. A preface reveals that Levick is an advocate of therapeutic cloning (to provide tissues for medical research), confining his reservations to reproductive cloning. It is in the preface, too, that he specifies his intended audience: the general reader, the scholar, and the clones of the future, suggesting that the process that so concerns him is inevitable. Case studies contribute to the readability of the book; the detailed notes satisfy the scholar. The first eight chapters describe different models for understanding the ramifications of cloning, such as the Identical Twin model, the Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Arrangements model, and the Stepchild model. Because, he acknowledges, no model is adequate in itself, Levick draws on what he finds the most compelling aspects of each in order to make a kind of patchwork model, described in Chapter 9. The final three chapters examine social and cultural implications of cloning; intimacy, sex, and sexuality; and the implications for ethics and policy. Levick's speculation on possibilities is commendable. The case material that informs his reflections is primarily psychoanalytic, and this is the dominant theoretical frame for the interpretation of his models. What Levick finds persuasive about each can be surprising. In the Identical Twin model, for example, illustrated by the first case study, it is not the genetically identical twin of the patient who illuminates the clone's experience, but the flawed relationship the patient has with his famous father. It can be crushing to a child who is expected to emulate a parent, constantly judged on success or failure; a narcissistic person who arranged to be replicated would tend to value his clone only to the extent that his expectations were realised. An unfortunate clone who outshone the progenitor might be resented, the object of parental jealousy. In assessing cases where a child is the product of the genes of only one parent, it is disconcerting that Levick emphasises problems with step-parenting over the comparison he draws with donor-assisted conception, despite acknowledging the significant difference between them: the donor-conceived child, unlike the step-child but like the clone, has been planned as the child of both intended parents. The wicked stepmother and her unhappy influence on the child is vividly implicit in Levick's account of the adverse consequences for children of being step-parented. His dismissal of evidence that donor-conceived children are adequately parented - on the grounds that it is wrongly interpreted - is unconvincing, which might be why he emphasises the Stepchild model as a strong argument against reproductive cloning. The motive for cloning, according to Levick, suggests a range of ways in which the autonomy of the clone might be denied from the outset. Whether to fulfil a desire for immortality, resurrect a dead child, or sidestep infertility to produce a child of one's own genes, the person is being created with powerful expectations of her or his appearance, abilities, and behaviour. Such a person might have to live with the ghost of the lost but not entirely displaced other, never quite overcoming the parental grief. Levick's case studies, however, are of narcissistic, demanding, dissatisfied, over-involved, rejecting, and jealous parents whose children are not their clones nor their partners’ clones. They are part of the wide spectrum of parental adequacy. It could be argued that parents of clones will also be distributed along this spectrum, and that their reasons for cloning themselves may be benign as well as self-serving, as are the reasons for parents who conceive by currently available means. Levick's valorising of biology and genes in claiming that sexual reproduction is the basis of a civil society presents a limited, heterosexist view of social harmony and cohesion. His caution seems to apply to a society in which all or nearly all of its citizens are clones, rather than one accommodating people conceived in a variety of ways, mostly sexual. It suggests a perverse insistence on the ‘natural’ while overlooking the many ‘unnatural’ supports of society and our increasingly long and healthy lives. It is vital to challenge emerging and potential reproductive technologies, especially when they are as revolutionary as cloning. Levick's thought experiment is a contribution to this process. Clone Being provides worst-case scenarios for those who oppose reproductive cloning but is unlikely to persuade those who do not perceive the process as intrinsically harmful. It does, however, suggest useful ways of considering motives for seeking to create a cloned being and of conceptualising the potential sources of harm to a person thus created

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