Who's afraid of the Brave New World? (Bioethics).

THE BIOETHICIST Leon R. Kass, who has been one of the most persistent opponents of human cloning, argues that we must ban it totally as a tactical step to head off the emergence of a truly horrible society something like that depicted in Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New World (1932). For Kass, it is not enough to ban reproductive cloning; to ensure that this cannot be done; we must also ban any creation of human embryos by somatic cell nuclear transfer, even for research or therapeutic purposes. In a lengthy article in the May 2001 issue of the New Republic, he argues that, should we take any other approach, we risk sliding into a Brave New World of eugenics and a "post-human" future.

Kass is not alone in invoking the ghost of Huxley when discussing questions of public policy. Other thinkers commonly allude to the prospect of a "Brave New World" in relation to such biotechnological possibilities as human cloning and various kinds of genetic enhancement. To take only one of a multitude of examples, Bryan Appleyard's main contribution to the debate is a book entitled Brave New Worlds: Staying Human in the Genetic Future (1999) (see my discussion of this in the September 1999 issue of Quadrant).

The idea that we must take action to avoid a Brave New World resonates powerfully within our culture. As Kass puts it, writing in the context of his own country's social and political environment, "the majority of Americans are not yet so degraded or so cynical as to fail to be revolted by the society depicted in Huxley's novel". Clearly, the same point could be made about Australians, or the citizens of any other country where Huxley's novel is likely to be read widely.

Kass does not suggest that a society anything like that depicted by Huxley will be imposed on us by force. His fear is that it will develop simply through the operation of the market, as individuals choose to use technologies in ways that are attractive and pleasant, but ultimately add up to create a dehumanised society.

Yet, in modern liberal societies, such as Australia, none of this initially seems like much of an argument for banning human cloning--or, indeed, anything else that relates to deeply personal choices about such things as sexual relationships and family formation. On the contrary, individual choices about the use of reproductive technology appear to fall clearly within the area that liberal societies attempt to cordon off from intervention by the state, even if some kind of utilitarian argument could be made for state action.

It is generally accepted within modern liberal societies that "experiments in living" should not be prohibited, but actually welcomed, unless there is a very good reason to do otherwise in a particular case. If our society's moral beliefs and cultural practices change as a result of the cumulative effect of individuals' choices about how they will live, including how they will use technology, that is usually acceptable. That is, indeed, one of the main ways in which social change comes about in the modern world.

With human cloning, the individual decisions that might ultimately influence the overall character of our society would be very understandable. Cloning would be used mainly by couples who could not otherwise have a child to whom at least one member of the couple had a genetic relationship. As the legal scholar John A. Robertson has pointed out in a Hofstra Law Review article published in 1999, the most likely candidates would be heterosexual couples where the man was severely infertile. However, cloning could also be used by lesbian couples who wished to have a child biologically related to both of them: to one by nuclear DNA, to the other by mitochondrial DNA and gestation.