"In his image: the cloning of a man": book review

Book review (Exam in Biotechnology)

The concepts discussed in the novel “IN HIS IMAGE: THE CLONING OF A MAN” tend to lean toward accuracy rather than fiction. Let me cite examples. At the beginning, for instance, David defines cloning as “a process by which you could, without the union of two sex cells, reproduce a plant, an animal, or theoretically even a human being and do so in such a way that the offspring would be the genetic twin of the organism cloned; that is, its genes and hence its inherited characteristics would be identical to those of its ‘parent.’” This view is parallel to most other definitions of cloning, which is “creating a copy of living matter, such as a cell or organism. The copies produced through cloning have identical genetic makeup and are known as clones…”

The novel likewise mentioned a multitude of scientists, particularly biologists, geneticists, and bioethicists. Among them are Virginia Apgar, who developed the Apgar Scoring System, now almost universally used to evaluate a newborn infant’s health; Kimball Atwood, Christiaan Barnard; Paul Berg, who witnessed firsthand the history of recombinant DNA research and regulation and is a Nobel Prize Laureate in Chemistry; Douglas Bevis; Francis Crick; a British biophysicist known for co-discovering the double-helix structure of DNA and shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins; Linus Pauling, an American theoretical chemist and biologist noted for his contribution in understanding of molecular structure and chemical bonding, and one of few people to have received two Nobel awards; and many others. After checking randomly the names of the figures cited, I have discovered that they did match the description of them in the novel.

The novel, overall, provides a roughly accurate—if not completely—analysis of cloning, genetic engineering, and other related topics. All the figures, along with their citations, appear to be completely genuine and not fictionalized. The novel, as a whole, in my opinion, is filled with extensive data regarding cloning and genetics and could even pass more as a science book than as a fiction novel, if not for the fictional acting characters.

Cloning faces many ethical and moral challenges. Cloning is considered “a touchy subject in the scientific community—not too far removed from Frankenstein’s monster…” Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Joshua Lederberg described cloning “as ‘a major revolutionary perturbation,’” ushering the potential for seemingly infinite disorder. In fact, the foremost fear of many is “What would happen if something went wrong—if we created some sort of monster, misshapen in body, mind, or both?”

To many people, perhaps “weary time-travelers”, cloning will strike a heavy blow, “heralding the irreversible approach of the synthesized, plasticized, carbon-copied Man. To these, the new man, like the new bread—processed, refined, bleached, artificially preserved and fortified, baked to absolute uniformity, and confined in a plastic skin—would be soulless.

Another issue is that cloning would need to use “test-tube babies,” examining individual cells from them under microscopes in an effort to discover their sex, then implanting those of the sex desired by the parents, while “jettisoning” the others… In plain English, “jettisoning” meant flushing down the drain.

A cloned individual might suffer a serious identity crisis, finding it difficult to distinguish himself from his donor. Thus any intrinsic potential this child might have had would be ignored and undercut.

The biggest challenge, it seems, is that might be unstoppable… given the fact that the same research advances required to bring it off were also those which would benefit mankind in important and diverse ways. Cell-fusion techniques, for example, were promising “one of the best avenues for understanding the genetic basis for cancer.” Already malignant cells were being fused with normal cells in an effort to isolate the individual chromosomes that might induce specific forms of cancer. To stop such experiments in order to preclude the possibility of cloning… would be regarded as irresponsible by most scientists.