Bearing One’s Own Child
Something just seems wrong about that to me.
According to this story on Wired News, scientists have successfully cloned a horse and that same horse carried the fetus to term. So, in essence, the horse gave birth to its own sister. As I mentioned at the top of this entry, there’s something about this that’s unsettling to me. I really think we’re going a bit far with this cloning technology. I admit that I really liked it when we were talking about bringing back extinct animals, but we get this kind of stuff along with the “good” stuff. It really makes me wonder where it will all end up.
Cloning, of course, has been a theme in science-fiction for quite some time. Both the good and bad aspects of it have been looked at in detail, but there’s always room for more stories. Will we eventually clone soldiers so we don’t have to send “real” humans into battle? Will we ever clone extinct animals, like dinosaurs and the marsupial wolf? Will we clone people to harvest the body parts for transplants? These are just some of the topics that have been covered, in varying detail, in science-fiction already. Mostly, these are cautionary tales and, I think that’s a wise and telling statement from the writers.
