Cloning Classics

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

When it comes to dealing with cloning, ethicists and science-fiction writers have almost indistinguishable job descriptions. Both groups propose hypothetical situations in which cloning might happen, then examine the likely implications. The only real difference is that ethicists respect the laws of plausibility and don't waste much time on scenarios that probably won't ever come to pass. Science-fiction writers trash those same laws with creative gusto.

The result has been a relentless stream of outrageous books, movies and television shows, beginning with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published 61 years ago, and continuing through the summer's box-office behemoth, Jurassic Park. There are mysteries, thrillers, love stories -- even a sci-fi parody of an old pop song ("Weird Al" Yankovic's I Think I'm a Clone Now, sung to the tune of Tommy James and the Shondells' I Think We're Alone Now). Cloning, in fact, has been a fertile enough subject to earn its own lengthy entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

Freed from the anchor of realism, fiction writers have drifted off in all sorts of strange directions. Huxley's idea was that cloning based on embryo splitting (he called it "bokanovskification") would be used to mass-produce drones for performing menial labor. Huxley's Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons were separated from the higher-class Alphas and Betas not just by economic status but also by biologically engineered physical and intellectual traits.

A different vision of cloning, involving not just the splitting of embryos but the generation of an entire human from a bit of tissue, leads down another fanciful path: re-creating a specific person. In Ben Bova's novel Multiple Man ; (1976), several exact copies of the U.S. President are found dead and no one is certain whether a clone or the real McCoy sits in the Oval Office. In Nancy Freedman's 1973 book Joshua, Son of None, the clone is a real President, John F. Kennedy. And, Ira Levin's 1976 novel (later a movie), The Boys from Brazil, imagines neo-Nazis cloning a batch of Hitlers; luckily the conspirators' failure to duplicate precisely the real Hitler's upbringing leaves the ersatz Fuhrers imperfectly evil.

If cloning became common, then sex -- along with male and female genders -- would be unnecessary. That's the conceit of books such as Charles Eric Maine's World Without Men (1958) and Poul Anderson's Virgin Planet (1959). Conversely, cloning might be a device for preserving love. The 1991 British TV miniseries The Cloning of Joanna May, based on a Fay Weldon novel, is about a man who dumps his unfaithful wife -- but only after cloning her so he can replace her with her twin a few years down the line.

There is one aspect of cloning, though, that writers have largely overlooked: its potential for laughs. The most obvious exception to that rule is Woody Allen in Sleeper. The high point of the film comes when Allen's character kidnaps the severed nose of a Big Brother-like dictator before it can be cloned to oppress the world once more, and holds it hostage at gunpoint. It's hard, though intriguing, to imagine what ethicists would do with that one.

With reporting by David Bjerklie/New York