A Nostalgic Look Back: Cloning
Whatever happened to cloning?
No, no, this is a legitimate question. I remember about ten years ago, maybe a little bit more than that, there was a buzz around ‘cloning’ as the next big scientific development. I was in high school at the time, and I recall devouring every news story about Dolly, the first cloned sheep, that I could get my hands on. I imagined a future in which the tiniest bit of our genetic material could be used to replicate life, and pondered the murky ethics that arose from this. And then time passed, and the whole craze just sort of faded away.
I was reminded of this in reading Robert Pepperell’s 2003 edition of Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain, in preparation for my term paper. In the preface, Pepperell mentions with much urgency developments in the field of genetics and cloning specifically, and what this might mean in the re-definition of the ‘human’. He references in particular a 2002 article in the Sunday Times about the imminence of the first successful human cloning (I’m fuzzy on this point, but I suspect my lack of memory suggests it wasn’t as successful or as imminent as Pepperell claims.)
So my question is this: What happened to all the hype about cloning? Would it have featured importantly in my Posthumanism course had it been offered eight years ago? Is it strange that cloning hasn’t even gotten the merest mention in class?
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