Clones and Clones: Facts and Fantasies About Human Cloning - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393320014 ISBN 13: 9780393320015

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999

Synopsis

"These two dozen essays by experts ranging from Stephen Jay Gould to Andrea Dworkin are an excellent guide to the post-Dolly world." --Chicago Tribune, Choice Selections of 1998

Human cloning is a prospect the contributors to Clones and Clones view with varying degrees of alarm, calm, ambivalence, and not a little humor. Ranging from psychoanalyst Adam Phillips's case study of a child whose confusion of "cloning" and "clothing" expresses our mixed desire and terror of sameness, to Stephen Jay Gould's and Richard Dawkins's "characteristically pithy and intelligent" essays (Civilization); from William Ian Miller's analysis of the queasiness the subject elicits in many of us, to Martha Nussbaum's witty and elegiac fantasy of the cloning of a lost lover-this superb collection limns our beliefs and concerns about what it means to be human. The writers here, says the San Diego Union-Tribune, "comprise an eclectic group, but their observations on the science and ethics of cloning, how it might fit into and affect human society and what the future might bring are just the sort of thinking that . . . we need more of." Praise for Clones and Clones: "A worthy exploration of a discomfiting topic." - Foreign Affairs "Greatly aid[s] the cloning debate." - Washington Post "The spectrum of authors and their varying perspectives in fact and fiction are assets to anyone who hopes to understand this broad issue and its vast cultural implications." - Publishers Weekly

About this title

Review:

Nussbaum and Sunstein have collected a comprehensive set of essays on the implications of cloning, which has not been attempted with humans as of this writing, but almost surely will be within a few years. The editors include Ian Wilmut's original research paper reporting the existence of Dolly, the cloned sheep, as well as ethical analysis papers by popular science writers such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins. Four fiction pieces round out the collection. Opinion pieces on topics ranging from the soul of a clone to clones raised for body parts are the most interesting essays in the bunch. In the horror-scenario category, Andrea Dworkin takes the position that in a world where cloning is possible, men will clone only compliant women, at last gaining the control over reproduction they've always wanted. (Dworkin ignores the fact that no gene for compliance has yet been isolated.) Questions of nature versus nurture will presumably be answered in the brave new world of cloning, and many of the writers in Clones and Clones imagine the ramifications of finding out how much our lives are predestined by our DNA. Read this book before you donate your cells to the local lab. --Therese Littleton

From the Publisher:

"Clones and Clones" was named one of the Best Books of 1998 by the Chicago Tribune as

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0393320014
• ISBN 13: 9780393320015
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352
• Editor: Nussbaum Martha C., Sunstein Cass R.