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>This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education
>(http://chronicle.com)
>
> From the issue dated May 25, 2001
>
> On Jews, Germans, and Clones
>
> By BARBARA KATZ ROTHMAN
>
> In March, Avi Ben-Abraham, an Israeli doctor, announced that
> he planned to clone a human being. I would have thought that
> Jews, of all people, would understand the dangers of playing
> with genetics. But no, it's not Jews who learned that lesson
> -- it's Germans. Wherever scientists start cloning people,
> trying to improve our genes, it won't happen in Germany.
>
> I'm a Jew who became interested in the genetic revolution not
> as a Jew, but as a mother. It was the idea of prenatal testing
> that first drew me in. Back in the 1980's, I wrote a book
> about how hard amniocentesis and other prenatal tests were on
> women. The book, The Tentative Pregnancy: Prenatal Diagnosis
> and the Future of Motherhood, was translated into German and
> is better known in Germany than in the United States.
>
> The first time I went to Germany to lecture about genetic
> testing, in 1990, my mother was troubled. She didn't want me
> there. She didn't want me to bring back any gifts, spend a
> penny more than I had to. If I could have packed bag lunches
> for the week, she'd have liked that. I too had mixed feelings
> about being there. I think most Jews would have at least a
> passing moment of discomfort on a first trip to Germany. After
> all.
>
> But I soon found that people in Germany knew and understood
> exactly what I was saying about genetic testing. It made sense
> to them to be troubled by prenatal testing and selective
> abortion, to be worried about what the tests meant for mothers
> -- and for a whole society's ideas about life and which lives
> are not worth living.
>
> Americans, by contrast, couldn't understand how I could be
> comfortable with an abortion to end an unwanted pregnancy but
> still be bothered by an abortion to prevent the birth of a
> child known to be disabled. In the United States, I had gotten
> used to feeling defensive about my views. But in Germany,
> everybody -- university students, audiences at public talks,
> cab drivers who asked me why I'd come to Germany -- seemed to
> get it. "Ah, yes," they'd say, "that's eugenical, isn't it?"
>
> Germans don't want to go down that path now. Not anywhere near
> it. Like children who have been burned by a hot stove, they
> pull back quickly from anything that smacks of eugenics. Make
> better people? Control who is permitted to be born? Not them,
> danke.
>
> Cloning is not just a matter of eugenics, of course. But it
> grows, as it were, from the same seeds. It grows from genetic
> determinism, the idea that the essence, the very soul and
> nature, of a person is in his or her genes.
>
> Cloning today is a solution in search of a problem. Some
> people want to try to clone humans just because they think it
> can be done. So they look for a good reason to persuade others
> to let them try. The two reasons most often suggested are both
> awful to contemplate: to make a copy of a dead child, and to
> enable someone who for physical reasons can't procreate -- a
> man without sperm, say -- to have a child.
>
> The first reason is the saddest, perhaps the most compelling
> -- and the most evil. That's probably the case an American
> scientist would make for cloning; I can picture the grieving
> parents now. What makes it evil is that it is a lie. It
> implies that if you have the same genes, you have the same
> person; that people can be replaced; that all we really are is
> our chromosomes grown up.
>
> Yet most of us know that identical twins, sharing not only
> their genes but even a uterus and a time and place in the
> world, turn out different from each other. Even co-joined
> twins, which we used to call Siamese twins, have their
> differences. I recall the parents of one such set of twins
> talking about how lovely it was when the more active, more
> talkative child fell asleep first, so they could have some
> private time with the quieter child.
>
> A child who dies cannot be replaced by cloning. And what a
> burden it would place on a child, born to be someone else --
> someone who is desperately missed, but someone you can never
> be.
>
> The second reason for cloning is, I'll bet, the reason that an
> Israeli would cite. The huntis probably on now for a child of
> Holocaust survivors, someone now in middle age, who has no
> children and cannot have any by ordinary means.
>
> Why would it be an awful thing to do, to clone that person?
> Because it would buy right into the idea that what makes a
> child "yours" is the genes -- without them, it's always
> somebody else's child. That hurts those of us who are adopted,
> or who have adopted children.
>
> That idea also cheapens parenthood for everyone. It dismisses
> the acts of love and nurturing that make parenting. Infertile
> people can have children who are very much their own, through
> adoption or procedures using donated sperm or eggs. The more
> we push dangerous and complicated -- and so far unsuccessful
> -- reproductive technologies on infertile people, the more we
> say that genes are more valuable than love and care.
>
> Hitler said that what made a Jew a Jew wasn't a matter of
> religious commitment, social values, or a sense of community.
> It was blood. That's why he had the newborns killed, too. He
> wanted to wipe out the Jewish race, the blood and genes of
> Jewishness.
>
> What makes a person? Is it just the instructions in the DNA,
> or is it the playing out of those instructions in the world?
> What makes a family? Is it genes, or the loving commitment
> people share? What makes a people, a community, a society?
> Germans know better than to look in the nucleus of the cell
> for answers to those questions. Shouldn't we all have learned
> that lesson by now?
>
> Barbara Katz Rothman is a professor of sociology at the City
> University of New York's Graduate School and University
> Center. Her most recent book is Genetic Maps and Human
> Imaginations: The Limits of Science in Understanding Who We
> Are (W. W. Norton, 1998), released in April by Beacon Press as
> The Book of Life: A Personal and Ethical Guide to Race,
> Normality, and the Implications of the Human Genome Project.
>
>
>_________________________________________________________________
>
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>
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>_________________________________________________________________
>
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>
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>
>_________________________________________________________________
>Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
>
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Keith B. Miller
Department of Geology
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506
kbmill@ksu.edu
http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~kbmill/
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