Cloning

Pinnacle Books, 1974. Mass market paperback, 1st printing. Reprints the 1972 Walker hardcover. Novel about human cloning.

Re: "Cloning" by David Shear, first published by Walker & Co. in 1972 (ISBN 0-8027-5555-0). There were also two paperback editions from Pinnacle Books, the first in 1974 (ISBN 0-523-00461-3), and the second in 1978 (ISBN 0-523-40450-6) with an additional last chapter, a new preface, and a nice cover design. There was also a hardcover U.K. version published in 1975 by Robert Hale & Co. (ISBN 0-7091-5113-6). Finally, there was a softcover German edition (translated by Frank N. Stone, ISBN 3-40400927-4) published in 1978 (without the extra chapter) by Bastei-Verlag Gustav H. Lubbe. They changed the name, for inscrutable reasons, to "Der Tod und sein Bruder" ("Death and his Brother").

There has been a great deal of interest in my book since the cloned sheep, Dolly, was announced in Feb. 1997 by Dr. Ian Wilmut in Endinburgh, Scotland. The method he used, employing the nucleus of an adult cell, was exactly what I described more than 25 years prior to the event--with some significant additions: starvation of the cell to put it in "stasis" and the use of small electrical shocks.

Since then, many animals other than sheep have been cloned, including cattle, mice and cats.

"Cloning" (1972) was apparently the first serious book written on the subject. I was heavily influenced by the scientific articles in the 1960's by John Gurdon (Oxford and Cambridge, England) regarding his attempts to clone frogs. Within the next few years, several other novels appeared, including "Joshua Son of None" (Nancy Freedman, 1973), "Cloned Lives" (Pamela Sargent, 1976) and "The Boys from Brazil" (Ira Levin, 1976).

There were also non-fiction works including "The Ethics of Genetic Control" by the philosopher Joseph Fletcher (1974), and "The Cloning of Man" (Martin Ebon, 1978; a good recapitulation of work and ideas up to that time).

The probable hoax, "In His Image: The Cloning of a Man," was published by David Rorvick in1978.

Aldous Huxley's classic novel "Brave New World" (1932) explored in detail how humans could be cloned by separating clusters of cells in the early embryo, which is the mechanism by which "identical" twins (quadruplets, etc.) occur in utero. This is not the method of cloning in use today.

Since they are not really identical, *genetically* identical multiples are more properly referred to as monozygotic (from a single fertilized egg, or zygote). Not everything is determined by genes. In plants, animals and other organisms, random (stochastic) processes during development are important, as well as environmental influences. The beginning embryo is only the "initial state." Twins occur in about one out of eighty human births in the U.S., and about one third of these pairs are "identical" (monozygotic). Most of us have encountered someone who is an identical twin and found him/her to be a perfectly normal person.

Debate continues on abortion, growing organs in culture for transplantation back to the donor, and on the question of the consciousness of automata (robots; androids). See the Kubric/Spielberg film, "Artificial Intelligence: AI" (2001), or the much better Ridley Scott "Blade Runner" (1982, based on the classic Phiilp K. Dick story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep") to enter the world of intelligent androids seeking status as "real" persons.

The question most often argued about regarding abortion is: "When does life begin?" But we know the answer to that one: It doesn't. As Louis Pasteur proved in the latter 19th century, spontaneous generation (life arising from non-living muck) never occurs. Restated, this means that life (cells, organisms) always arise from pre-existing life, and of the same species. Even the haploid gametes (eggs and sperm) are perfectly normal, though specialized, human cells.

The question should be: "When does a person begin?" Using brain death as the criterion for the cessation of a person, it follows that before the cerebral cortex is formed, and a fortieri, before even a rudimentary brain is present, the embryo is not a person. That is, the beginning of a person cannot precede the formation of a brain. (This is a "no brainer.") Thus the undifferentiated, spherical blastula, from which stem cells can be cultured, cannot be a person

In 1972, few people knew what "cloning" meant. I believe the word came into the common lexicon with Woody Allen's film "Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex" (1972). In one of the vignettes, a dictator was to be cloned from his nose--all that remained after he had been killed by a bomb. (The nose was flattened by a steamroller before the cloning could be done.)

I was criticized in two book reviews (one by Lester DelRay) for having members of a human clone distinguished by their fingerprints. The reviewers were mistaken. I had thoroughly verified what I already suspected: that "identical" twins (a human clone with two members) do have different, though often similar, fingerprints.