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.A rich couple set out to copy a pet named Missy BY R.U. SIRIUS | It's either the height of millennial decadence, a striking example of bourgeois banality or a rather charming instance of puppy love. But, as the Web site protests right up front, it is not a joke. A team of scientists and technicians headquartered at Texas A&M University is attempting to clone a rich couple's cute little pet dog, Missy. On the Web site, the unidentified woman owner (she prefers the term "human mother") emotes about finding the dog in a kennel: "Her eyes stared at me and I couldn't look away. She poked her nose through the fence, whined, got her paw through an opening and when I took her paw in my hand, she licked it. Then she whirled in a circle, displayed her full white tail and tried again to get at me." The conflation of this kind of gooey sentimentality with what biotech critic Andrew Kimbrell calls "the engineering and marketing of life" strikes us as funny, in all senses of the word. After all, while many of us (including yours truly) are reduced to abject blithering over the perceived cuteness of our pets, I'll bet a rare few have thought about making a bunch of copies. Before the July 1997 advent of the Missyplicity Project -- as the first attempt to clone a dog calls itself -- animal cloning was the province of agribusiness. The cloning of agricultural animals like Dolly the sheep is about scientific experimentation, yes; but it is also about two bottom-line concerns of Western civilization -- money and meat. While the Missyplicity Project is looking into patent possibilities, there are no current plans to sell Missy's clones, and Missyplicity spokesman Lou Hawthorne denies that the project is about profit: "We're spending $2.3 million, and we're several steps from the initial cloning to any kind of commercial application." I don't foresee a 24-hour canine copying service in our near future, so I won't worry the point. Money doesn't seem to be the main motivation here. In fact, the Web site cloaks the project in noble intentions, telling us that dog cloning promises beneficial results such as improved understanding of canine reproductive biology, enhanced reproduction of endangered canine species, improved canine contraceptive and sterilization methods and the replication of valuable search-and-rescue dogs, among other worthy goals. But the do-good justifications don't seem to be the bottom line, either. I comment to Hawthorne, "This is actually a rather whimsical project and a little bit of that playfulness comes through on the Web site." Hawthorne replies in the chirpy, speedy speech patterns prevalent among young nerds: "Yeah. That's the main thing about the project. It's a fun thing to do. It's neat." Neat. "Man" used to climb mountains or smash atoms because they were there. Now we bioengineer pets because it's "neat." Neat seems to be a purposefully inarticulate word nerds employ to describe the joy of doing pure science -- now that cultural relativism has made it impossible to speak the words "pure science" aloud. Yet when the science in play is a technology for messing with life's essence, people who are inclined to get righteously spooked are entitled to a surfeit of paranoia. Polls indicate that most of us, in fact, feel a bit spooked by the implications of cloning. Still, the most active critical opposition derives from a strange bedfellowship of religious fundamentalists and leftish naturalist environmentalists. To me, this is a red flag: It suggests that opposition to cloning (and bioengineering in general) represents the same sort of neo-Puritanism that brought some sex-negative feminists together with the Christian right around stopping pornography. Perhaps we should mock their reactionary fears, as Timothy Leary did when he wrote, "Think of all the hot-button issues that get the church fathers' panties all in a bunch: conception, test-tube fertilization, contraception, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, abortion, euthanasia, suicide, cloning, life extension, altered states, cryonics, cyborgization (i.e. replaceable body parts), sperm banks, egg banks, DNA banks, artificial intelligence, artificial life and personal speculation about and experimentation with immortality. All things that experiment with the basic issues of birth, embodiment and death are anathema to the orthodox seed shepherds, the engineers of the feudal and industrial age." But dismissing fears of a bioengineered planet as merely reactionary is a bit too easy. After all, among most thoughtful people, it's not the technology itself that worries. It's some of the potential uses of that technology and, most of all, it's the context -- the society in which it is being birthed. It is the fact that, according to Jeremy Rifkin's "Biotech Century," an Alaskan businessman named John Moore woke up one day to discover "that his own body parts had been patented, without his knowledge, by the University of California at Los Angeles and licensed to the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Corporation" -- this being just one example of people discovering bits of their interiors claimed by corporate interests. Researcher Craig Vinter of the National Institute of Health, among others, is already preparing to patent the human genome, according to Kimbrell's "The Human Body Shop." This gives one pause. Or paws. Does the colonizing of the entire human genome seem a bit like a back-door approach to the return of slavery, in this case perhaps the enslavement of the entire species? Should we study "The X-Files" more closely? It's in this context that the Missyplicity Project must be reinterpreted. It starts to take on the appearance of surrealism, of shouting theater in a crowded fire. In its emphasis on cloning for the hell of it, it maps closely to the cyberpunk idea that technology isn't interesting in its use or abuse by societal interests, but rather when it manifests itself in some unintended and unexpected way -- when something bubbles up out of left field. When this something happens to be a wealthy couple's cloning their dog, posting sticky-sweet memories of doggie devotion on a Web site replete with links to papers advocating the positions of the biotech industry, it becomes a kind of burlesque that cries out to be turned into a John Waters movie. And that, I think, is charming more than anything else. Freelance writer and cyber-iconoclast R.U. Sirius will be the presidential candidate for the new political party the Revolution in 2000 and is editor in chief of GettingIt, a new Web zine set for a May debut.
Clone wars Cloning is hardly as revolutionary as you might expect -- or as unnatural as its opponents argue. But the science that makes it possible could also allow the rich to turn themselves into a different species.
"Clone: The Road to Dolly and the Path Beyond" Review of Gina Kolata's book.
Clone rangers While the rest of the world has moved beyond last month's cloning madness, a number of gay writers and activists have seized on Cloning Rights as the next big crusade. They're wasting their time.
Dr. Frankenstein, I presume The scientist who cloned the first adult mammal is worried: that his research might be misused -- or that it might not be used at all.
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