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Do-it-yourself cloning kits could cause ... |
Do-it-yourself cloning kits could cause a rift in the nuclear familyWE MAY not be able to provide basic primary health care in this country but, if recent newspaper reports are correct, a Johannesburg fertility clinic has the expertise and equipment to replicate genetic material and create human clones. Dr Mohamed Cassim is currently preparing an application to the University of Witwatersrand's ethics committee for permission to go ahead with cloning. If he gets the thumbs up he will get to work on four Gauteng women who are so desperate to have children they will allow Cassim and his team of ovarian opportunists to create replicas of themselves or their husbands. Apparently this cloning lark is no big deal. Cassim reportedly said: "Getting the genetic material into an egg is easy . . . my son could do it." If it's as easy as that then I wonder whether the best selling toy next Christmas won't be a home cloning kit. Schoolkids will be able to replicate their best friends in the comfort of their own bedrooms. While the moral and philosophical arguments against cloning have already been spelt out, nobody has really considered the practical implications. If the cloned child can be a replica of either the mother or the father, who gets to choose? There's much to be said for the gene pool, even when you're only dipping into the shallow end. A child that is exactly like one of its parents is likely to prove exasperating for the parent it replicates. Take wine gums for example. Not many people like the green ones, but I do. At the moment, wine gum consumption in the Bullard household is an amiable affair, with me giving up the orange ones in exchange for the green ones. The distribution of the other colours then simply becomes a matter of wine gum détente or who can chew faster. Enter junior, a cloned replica, and before too long we will be fighting over the green wine gums. Then there is the problem of airports. Heaven knows, it's bad enough trying to recognise somebody coming through international arrivals as it is. Once cloning has really taken off and we are into third-generation replicants, we'll presumably need a bar code scanner to recognise our relatives at Johannesburg International. The official view of the Health Department appears to be that cloning is illegal in terms of the Human Tissues Act. In addition, Health Minister Nkosazana Zuma is wisely sidestepping comment on the issue, presumably on the sound principle that she has already courted enough controversy for one term of office. The last thing her career needs now is the scandal of Sarafina Sarafina Sarafina, a new musical extolling the virtues of cloning. Most significantly, though, the hue and cry over Cassim's proposed experiment ignores one important fact: cloning is already here in SA and has been practised for years. Anybody who studies old videos of National Party conferences couldn't fail to notice that, not only was everybody dressed identically, right down to the homburgs and the ludicrous flower arrangement in the lapel, but they even said the same things. Could the Nats have been the result of some ghastly uncontrolled scientific experiment, I wonder? However, evidence of widespread cloning in SA goes beyond mere politics. Whether it's in the leafy suburb of Constantia or among the sterile, labyrinthine shopping centres of Johannesburg's northern suburbs, it's impossible to ignore the fact that thousands of bejewelled women with identical platform shoes, designer handbags and nasal accents are all shopping in identical stores with cloned men who drive the same type of car. Spooky isn't it?
Now it's becoming more widely known that I am no longer gainfully employed in the financial markets, I am starting to receive invitations to freebies. Last week several busloads of scribblers with nothing better to do were whisked off to the revamped Mount Grace in Magaliesberg. The main part of the hotel caught fire last year and has been rebuilt in local stone, but this time round it has a tin roof and plenty of ashtrays. Upon arrival, a waiter with a lone dry martini on a salver stalked me, greeted me by name, offered me the glass and hoped that it was mixed to my specifications, which it was. If that happens every time I visit a Grace hotel, I fear my plans to become teetotal will have to be postponed.
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