Sometimes, a spoonful of humor can make science more palatable. That is, if you’re not diabetic. The important question that How To Defeat your Own Clone: And Other Tips for Surviving the Biotech Revolution poses is (the title is a giveaway) how, exactly, can one defeat his/her own clone, should the need ever arise? It’s a tongue-in-cheek book, but also a scientifically based, non-fiction look at cloning, the biotech revolution, and the possibility that one day we might have to kick some clone butt. If that need ever arises, your future self will one day thank me for having recommended this book to you. Hopefully, your clone won’t have read it first, and beaten you to the punch.
The authors’ light-hearted attempts at humor, probably much like mine with this review, might not always succeed at making you LOL, but that’s not the ultimate point of it, now is it? Killing them before they kill us is the name of the game!
The book is fairly short, at just 192 pages, which includes the Epilogue and the Acknowledgements pages. The chapters range from ”The Biotech Revolution,” to “Cloning and You,” “Common Misconceptions About Cloning and Biotechnology,” “Bioenhancements,” “A Starter Kit for Playing God,” and the last one, “How To Defeat Your Own Clone.”
So, to avoid the risk that this review will come close to be as long as the book, I’ll just mention some of the topics it covers, in brief, and mix in my general assessment of the book as a whole.
I’m not entirely sure the book works as a humorous satire (though perhaps it’s not meant to be one), but it does have some genuinely funny parts, and it presents a scientific look at cloning and the dangers that might result from cloning that the layman can understand. It should only be considered to be an introduction to the subject, but a lot of interesting topics and subtopics are included. Subjects like genetic variation, the human genome, mutations, etc., are discussed.
In the second chapter, the authors take the hypothetical example of a “would-be cloner” they call “Jimmy.” He begins with something relatively simple, cloning viruses. But, as they write, it’s only simple to clone viruses “because viruses are so simple.” For Jimmy to try to clone himself is a much more difficult matter. Attempting to duplicate, or clone, a human genome is a much more daunting task. The authors write that the human genome has “more than three-billion pairs” of genes.
And defeating his own clone, not to mention a whole army of his own clones? Also not an easy thing to do, at least if one believes that by looking like you, they also might think similarly to you, and be able to counter anything you might come up with, and try to kill you before you kill him/her. That’s not very likely, though, because just like with identical twins–nature’s clones–clones created by science would be different from each other in some ways, due to any number of random factors.
Assuming your clone develops in utero, by the time it gets old enough to go toe-to-toe in combat with you, you’ll probably be at least twenty years older than the clone. Your clone will lack your experience, but will likely be stronger, as well as younger, and may have biological enhancements to make it even more formidable. Though it will look like you, the past experiences your clone will have had will be not your past experiences. Your religious beliefs (or lack of them) won’t be his/hers. As the authors mention, even if you somehow were able to get your mother to agree to carrying your clone until he/she was born, she will have changed with age, which would result in other differences between the two of you.
The portions of the book dealing with the differences that are sure to occur between yourself and your clone, and that deal with the many ethical problems that cloning a human bring up, were the most interesting parts of the book to me. Cloning may be playing God, as some people opposed to it believe; but, cloning is being done on a daily basis, regardless of what you believe is morally right, and the cloning of humans isn’t far away in the future, if it hasn’t been done successfully already somewhere in the world.
I have issues with it, myself, like why should more people be added to the world’s population, when there are already too many people here? Also, what makes one person more worth cloning than another, and if cloning is done merely to use one’s clone when needed to harvest its body parts, is it too much akin to murder? And, if it came down to a decision to kill one’s clone to save one’s life, because the clone is trying to kill you, isn’t it still the same as murdering someone? Also, though we each believe in our own self-importance, does that necessarily mean that defeating one’s one clone is a good thing?
What if Hitler had had a clone, and the clone came to believe that the person he was cloned from was evil, and tried to assassinate the original Hitler before millions of people would be needlessly killed in WWII? In such a scenario, it could be argued that it’s sometimes a morally good outcome to be defeated by one’s own clone. That’s not going to happen, at least not until/unless time travel’s perfected, but similar cases can be easily imagined, and have been, in the pages of various SF novels.
There is a lot of ramifications to think about when it comes to cloning. The title of this book is eye-catching, and might be enough in itself to make you want to pick up the book and pluck down your hard-earned money to buy a copy. Hopefully, it’ll make you want to read more books on the subject. It’s a subject that affects us all, and it will continue to do so in the future. Just pray that a copy doesn’t fall into the hands of the wrong sort of person…like your clone!
