The Moon and the Clones

By LANCE MORROW

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou no breath at all? --King Lear

The news of the death of astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space, arrived at the same time last week as a report that scientists in Hawaii have cloned 50 mice.

Yesterday's future passeth away; a brand-new future cometh. It was as if the future had performed a changing of the guard.

With Shepard's death, time seemed less elastic than we thought it was. The old outleaping moment of the race to the moon, science and technology's heroic counterpoint to the '60s' rage and mess, was now, as embodied in the first young all-American leaper, dead of leukemia at the age of 74. You may rescind the laws of gravity but not of mortality.

John Glenn, of course, will head into space again this year on a shuttle at the age of 77--an admirable feat for a geezer but no longer the irreplaceable original. In those days, rockets named for the god Apollo went up from Cape Kennedy like chariots of fire and carried a cargo of such elemental significance and mystery that even Norman Mailer was awed and knocked off his ego for an hour or two. Mailer wrote that Cape Kennedy was "the antechamber of the new creation."

Today the new creation involved in cloning is no doubt visionary (Frankenstein goes partners with Henry Ford in the mass production of life) and also plunges forth into mystery, though of a different sort from that approached by astronauts. Think of the 50 Hawaiian mice and then extrapolate, taking your metaphysics as far as your imagination will carry you. What, exactly, are the implications of unsouled reduplication?

As gods, we are cautious. We send the animals before us. The Soviets launched a dog called Laika on a Sputnik 2 space vehicle in 1957; in 1961 the Americans fired up a chimpanzee named Ham in a Mercury capsule. Presumably Ham, with his evolutionary advantage, had a richer experience in space than the astronaut dog. When America at last committed a human life to the venture, Shepard advanced the space program by an evolutionary quantum leap. He lived to become more famous still by playing golf on the moon during his Apollo 14 expedition in 1971.

The cloners also send the animals before us. First, last year, came the single sheep Dolly. Now the 50 mice. First the individual, then the horde. Charles Lindbergh crossed dangerous virgin atmosphere to get over the Atlantic to Paris in 1927; that same air is now dense with flying auditoriums of people.

The space agenda remains splendid though underfunded. If the leading edge of popular curiosity trends for the moment away from space and toward cloning, we may sense that in the transition the future has grown a little retrograde, at least from a moral and theological point of view. As the American space program began in the '50s, rockets routinely exploded on the launch pad and collapsed into their own ruins like defunct Las Vegas casinos. The nation's leading rocketmeister was the boy wonder of Peenemunde, Wernher von Braun, inventor of Hitler's Vengeance Rocket, the V-2. (I Aim at the Stars was the title of Von Braun's memoir; comedian Mort Sahl's suggested subtitle was "But Sometimes I Hit London.")

But after Shepard's flight and Glenn's earth orbit the following year, and on through the expensive brilliance of the Apollo moon sequence, the space program became for a time numinous. One night in the late fall of 1972, I sat beside Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in a chigger-ridden field at Cape Kennedy and waited for the firing of Apollo 17, the only night launch. All of us (VIPS, press and, on the roads beyond, the entire Winnebago nation) had assembled essentially and inarticulately to worship. Civilization going back thousands of years (the Greeks, Pythagoras, Galileo, Newton, Einstein and on to the NASA geeks with slide rules) was poised to ride up out of the sandy, swampish Florida ooze. The great rocket, with its conical nubbin of human life up top, glowed in a radiance of light beams--mysterious, still and white.

Action: clouds of billowing fire. The earth quivered. The mighty thing that we had extracted from the earth with our tools and shrewd opposable thumbs rose from the earth and shot up, stately, to the moon. It seems a long time ago.

At the moment of an Apollo launch a few years earlier, Mailer found himself saying aloud, "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!" He was pointing, like the rocket, toward another dimension.

It's hard to know exactly where the cloning points. Maybe it would not be a bad idea to put a payload of 50 mice aboard the next space shuttle. Perhaps in the farther future, our clones should do the space colonizing for us while we originals stay back at our messy headquarters on earth. Would that parse theologically?