Clones and Clones

Distinguished scholars and writers from a broad range of disciplines address a troubling and fascinating issue. "To many if not most of us, cloning represents a possible turning point in the history of humanity," write the editors of Clones and Clones--a prospect the contributors to this stimulating volume view with varying degrees of alarm, disgust, grief, 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 Cass Sunstein's projections of utterly plausible Supreme Court decisions both for and against human cloning; from William Miller's analysis of the queasiness and nervous laughter the subject elicits in many of us ("Sheep jokes are sex jokes," he notes), to Richard Epstein's libertarian argument against a research ban; from Andrea Dworkin's denunciation of another masculine effort to control reproduction 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. Other contributors: Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker (science); Eric and Richard Posner, William Eskridge and Ed Stein, and Laurence Tribe (law); David Tracy, Wendy Doniger, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Dan Brock (religion and ethics); journalist George Johnson; sociologist Barbara Rothman; philosopher Felicia Ackerman; science fiction writer Lisa Tuttle; and poet C. K. Williams. The book also features Ian Wilmut's original article in Nature and excerpts from the report of the National Bioethics Advisory Council.