Hold the clone jokes for a minute.
Shelve the scenarios about made-to-order drones and geniuses.
Stifle the egos who want to copy themselves or sell the cells of bankable stars like Michael Jordan or Bill Gates or Julia Roberts for replication.
The back-to-reality truth is this: There will never, ever, be another you.
Assume that it’s possible to clone a new human from an adult’s cell and that no government regulations prohibit it. Even so, no such clone will be an exact duplicate of the original person.
Scientists have argued for decades about nature versus nurture, about how much of who we are is genetically programmed and how much is the result of environment. And they’ve argued endlessly about just how the blueprint–spelled out in millions of bits of our DNA–is modified by the immeasurable influences around us.
Whether we are a 50-50 mix of heredity and environment, or 60-40 or 35-65 or some other incalculable ratio, environment makes a huge, indelible difference. Tons of scientific studies, heaps of child-care books, centuries of experience with parenting and schooling all testify to that fact.
Even if scientists eventually do clone an adult human, there is no way they can clone the environment in which that child will develop. There will never, ever, be another you.
Right from the beginning, your clone’s environment would be different from yours. Your cloned genetic material would be transferred to a specially treated ovum and then implanted in a surrogate mother, who would provide a different intrauterine environment than you experienced. (Even if you could persuade your wife to be the birth mom, knowing she had no genetic share in the child, you could not duplicate the first nine months of your own existence.)
The health of your clone’s birth mother, her nutrition, her age, even her level of stress during pregnancy would affect how your clone developed. If she has an infectious disease, especially in the first trimester, if she smokes or drinks or uses prescription or street drugs, it could affect your unborn clone.
Your clone would also be born under different circumstances than were you. If his birth weight is low, if he is deprived of oxygen momentarily, it could make a difference in his development.
A child’s brain grows rapidly during the years after birth, its physical structure and thinking power partially dependent on the amount of learning stimulation in his environment. No one could give your clone precisely the same learning opportunities you received or bond with him in exactly the same loving way.
The family in which your clone would grow up would be considerably different from yours and influence him in different ways. Even siblings living in the same home, with the same parents, don’t share exactly the same experiences. Birth order, for one thing, can be a significant factor; first-born people, for example, are the most likely to become leaders, studies show.
Your clone wouldn’t have the desperate drive to succeed you got from growing up poor, knowing you had to earn your way to college. He would expect you to bail him out if he gets in trouble and to grease his way all along, understanding that your ego investment in him is too big to let him fail, or even to be average.
Your clone would grow up in a sex-saturated society and become sexually active at a younger age than you dared. His temptations–and opportunities–to try street drugs would be greater than you ever faced. Your genetic propensity to be adventuresome could lead him to experiment disastrously with dope instead of a prize-winning science project or an innovative computer program.
Your clone would look a lot like you. But with new knowledge about nutrition, he would top out at two inches taller. He would exercise more, play more sports, have a stronger physique–and fight your genetic predisposition to be overweight more successfully.
He would grow up without cavities, although he would need braces on his teeth, just as you did. He would have to get glasses at the same age you did and eventually, he would start losing his hair as you are beginning to do.
You might be able to push your clone hard enough to turn him into what you want him to be–a pitcher, a pianist, a stock market whiz, a scientist, a promising politician. But whatever his inherited aptitudes, he might resist and rebel, especially because he would resent your egocentric insistence on trying to make him be, not himself, but a copy of you.
He would become adept at turning off your preaching about how he could avoid the mistakes you made and achieve your goals for him. Because of your own huge, impatient drive to succeed in everything you do, you would often find him insubordinate and irritating.
You might even wonder, if only for a minute, why you wanted to reproduce your stubborn, demanding, headstrong, egotistical self anyway.
