bits removed, you’d be forgiven for thinking they came from a more mainstream futurist like Ray Kurzweil, or even a technology entrepreneur like Elon Musk. I’d go so far as to say that, when stripped of the really weird stuff, Raël’s vision of the future is one that would appeal to many who see humans as no more than sophisticated animals and technology as a means of enhancing and engineering this sophistication.
In Raël’s mind, human cloning is a critical technology in a three-step program for living forever.25 Some transhumanists believe the route to longevity involves being cryogenically frozen until technology advances to the point at which it can be used to revive and repair them. Others seek longevity through technological augmentation. Raël, though, goes one step further and suggests that the solution to longevity is disposable bodies. And so, we have his three-step program to future immortality, which involves (1) developing the ability to clone and grow a replacement human body, (2) developing the technology to accelerate the rate of growth, so an adult body takes weeks rather than years to produce, and (3) developing the technology to upload our minds into cyberspace, and then download them into a fresh new (and probably upgraded) cloned version of yourself.
Stupendously complex (not to mention, implausible) as this would be, there are people around who think that parts of this plan are feasible enough that they’re already working on it, as we’ll see in later chapters. Raël’s plan would, naturally, require the ability to grow a body outside of a human womb. But this is already an active area of research, as we saw in chapter two. And, as we’ll explore in later chapters, neuroscientists and others are becoming increasingly excited by the prospect of capturing the essence of the human mind, to the point that they can reproduce at least part of it in cyberspace.
What particularly fascinates me here is that, beneath the Raëlian mysticism and UFO weirdness, this movement is playing with ideas that are increasingly garnering mainstream attention. And this means that, even if we won’t be growing bodies in our basements anytime soon, we have to take the possibility of human reproductive cloning seriously. And this means grappling not only with the ethics of the process itself, but also the ethics of how we chose to treat and act toward those clones we create.
Genuinely Human?
Louise Brown was born in the year 1978. What made Louise unique was that she was the world’s first child to be conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF).
I was thirteen at the time, and not especially interested the bigger world of technology innovation around me (that would come later). But Louise’s birth stuck with me, and it was because of a conversation I remember having with my mother around about this time.
I don’t remember the details. But what I do remember is my mother wondering if a child conceived in a test tube would be like other people as they grew up—most especially, whether they would have a soul.26
Of course, Louise and all the millions of other IVF-conceived babies that have been born over the years, are just as complete as every other of the seven billion plus people living on this planet. There is nothing about the mode of conception that changes the completeness or the value of a person.
This should be self-evident. But as a quick Google search reveals, there are still more people than I would have imagined who are worried about the “humanity” of those conceived outside of biological intercourse.
One example in particular stood out to me as I was writing this chapter. In 2015, a contributor with the alias “Marie18” wrote on the website Catholic Answers Forum:
I learned today that my parents had me and my twin through IVF, and I just feel kind of devastated. Do IVF babies have souls? I would think so, but I just feel really uneasy that I was conceived through science, and I wasn’t in God’s plan for my parents.
So, pretty much what I’m asking is if we have souls or not. I know in my heart that I do, but I’ve read some very upsetting things on the internet by Christians and Catholics.27
It’s heart-rending that anyone should even have to ask this question. But it suggests that the premise of Never Let Me Go isn’t as far-fetched as it might at first seem.
In Never Let Me Go, society absolves itself of the guilt of treating children as a commodity by claiming that clones are somehow less than human, that they are merely human-created animals and no more. It’s a convenient lie—much like the one underpinning the Precrime program we’ll encounter in Minority Report (chapter four)—that allows the non-clones in the movie to tell themselves it’s okay to grow clones for their organs and kill them when they’re done.
What the movie so eloquently illustrates is that, far from being somehow less than human, Tommy and Kathy and Ruth are as human as anyone else in the society they live in. In this respect, Never Let Me Go challenges us to think critically about what defines our humanity and our “worth” as Homo sapiens.
What gives us worth, or value, as individuals, is an increasingly important question as we develop technologies that enable us to not only redesign ourselves, but also use what we know of ourselves to develop new entities entirely. Human enhancement and augmentation, the merging of human and cybernetic systems, artificial intelligence, and cloning, all potentially threaten our sense of identity. And yet we stand at a point in human history where, more than at any previous time, we have the means to alter ourselves and redesign what we want to be.
In this emerging world, “different” is no longer simply something we’re born with, but something we have the means to create. In fact, it’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that our growing technological abilities are heading toward a point where they threaten to fundamentally challenge our identity as a species. And as they do this, they are forcing us to reconsider—just as Never Let Me Go does—what “human” means in the first place.
On December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.28 In its first Article, this historic declaration states, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
This, and the following twenty-nine Articles of the Declaration, establish a moral and ethical basis for attributes we as a society believe are important: equality, dignity, freedom, and security for all people. But the Declaration doesn’t actually define what “human” means.29
Ask most people, and I have a feeling that the answer to “What is it to be human?” would include attributes such as being self-aware, being able to think and reason, having human form, being the product of a female egg and a male sperm, or being a member of a distinct biological species.30 These seem a not-too-bad starting point as characteristics that we can measure or otherwise identify. But they begin to look a little weak as we develop the ability to reengineer our own biology. They also leave the door open for people or “entities” that don’t easily fit the definition conveniently being labeled as “less than human,” including those that don’t fit convenient but arbitrary norms of physical and intellectual ability, or who are simply perceived as being “different.”
This is not a new challenge, of course. Ironically, one of our defining features as a species is an unerring ability to label those we don’t like, or feel threatened by, as “less than human.” Through some of the most sordid episodes in human history, distinctions of convenience between “human” and “not human” have been used to justify acts of atrocity; it’s easier to justify inhuman acts when you claim that the focus of them isn’t fully human in the first place.
We can surely learn from cases of socially unacceptable behavior that have led to slavery, repression, discrimination, and other forms of abuse. If we cannot, cloning and other technologies that blur our biological identity
