The Joys and Sorrows of Cloning Ourselves

What would it mean if we could all bring another life into the world, no matter the sexual organs we were born with? With cloning, we would no longer need a sperm and an egg, a man and a woman, to create new life. Children would have one parent: a parent who knows them better than they know themselves, for that parent was once them—or at least a variation, a doppelganger, of them.

 But what expectations would we put upon our clone child? Because they share our exact gene expression, would we assume too much? Would we intervene to prevent them from making mistakes they haven’t even contemplated? Would we expect their gratitude if we give them everything we always wanted that we never had?

Cloning ourselves may answer those perennial questions about nature versus nurture. We know our own natures, so now whatever differences emerge in our clone child must be due to nurturing—our nurturing, our shaping of a malleable psyche. We can guide our clone child to become far better than ourselves if we are altruistic, or far worse if we are vengeful.

And what is the future of humanity if we can clone ourselves? We may be doomed to forever remain stagnant with the same people forever renewed. Nothing new under the sun, for why take a chance on a completely new person through random gene combination when you can give rise to that which is already known? In such a world there will be no need for two-partner family units to conceive or raise children, either. Individualism will win out. Narcissism too perhaps.

Or perhaps the connections between generations will bind us as never before. In this future world, made up of generations of clone parents and clone children, it’s possible we will finally stamp out the pain of loneliness, of being misunderstood, of never reaching our potential. We will belong—to our parent, to our child, to our grandparent—and we will know it.  Maybe that’s all any of us really wants.