From Clive Mather
Sheffield
It is interesting that heredity plays so large a part in behaviour,
especially as we get older
(New Scientist, Science, 14 June, p 16).
Perhaps those newspaper editors who favoured human cloning in the wake of the
controversy over Dolly should be told. The line that seemed to be standard at
the time in a number of liberal broadsheets was that human cloning would not
matter, as personality is shaped by environment. Cloned individuals would have
different experiences and therefore different personalities, so clones would not
be carbon copies.
Although it would be an exaggeration to say that a set of cloned individuals
would be identical, they would certainly have very similar personalities. There
would therefore be scope to produce large numbers of people sharing certain
desired characteristics. This does not mean a mad tyrant breeding armies of
supermen. In reality, much more subtle forces, such as the requirements of the
labour market, would shape choice in these matters, its invisible hand moulding
the human genome.
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