Cloning, Then and Now

Abstract The possibility of human cloning first surfaced in the 1960s, stimulated by the report that a salamander had been cloned. James D. Watson and Joshua Lederberg, distinguished Nobel laureates, speculated that the cloning of human beings might one day be within reach; it was only a matter of time. Bioethics was still at that point in its infancy—indeed, the term “bioethics” was not even widely used then—and cloning immediately caught the eye of a number of those beginning to write in the field. They included Paul Ramsey, Hans Jonas, and Leon Kass. Cloning became one of the symbolic issues of what was, at that time, called “the new biology,” a biology that would be dominated by molecular genetics. Over a period of five years or so in the early 1970s a number of articles and book chapters on the ethical issues appeared, discussing cloning in its own right and cloning as a token of the radical genetic possibilities.