Can Souls be Cloned?
- Hindu College Gazette Web Team
- 5 days ago
- 8 min read
Dolly–the sheep– was euthanized on the 14th of February, 2003. Ian Wilmut, the leader of the research group that first cloned a Finnish Dorset Lamb (Dolly) in 1996, commented on her death, ‘‘People think I wouldn’t miss her because I could make another Dolly, but what they don’t understand is that she has her own individuality and there would never be another sheep like her.’’
Using selected ideas in ‘Never Let Me Go’ by Kazuo Ishiguro and ‘Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy’ by Sarah Franklin, this essay aims to explore the theme of cloning. This text will discuss how the concept of ‘sanctity of life’ has been impacted by the biological ‘achievement’ of cloning. It will attempt to traverse a partly moral space of cloning but also what this process means for the identity of humans and animals alike.
The 2025 film ‘Mickey 17’ by Bong Joon Ho explored the controversial theme of cloning. In the movie, Christian Americans opposed the creation of clones because they believed in the concept of ‘one soul for one body’. This idea intrigued me greatly and I delved a little deeper into what cloning meant for some Christians.
The words of the Bible exemplify the sanctity of life. God created humanity in his image, which suggests that humans have some of the attributes of God and a sanctity of life that we should seek to preserve. The Bible tells us that our bodies are not our own, rather, they belong to God. Since our bodies do not belong to ourselves, we can reasonably assume that others’ bodies do not belong to us either. Hence, the act of cloning essentially goes against the image created by God.
Further, it is believed that although Satan does not have the power of creation, he can take what has already been created and modify it. This implies that cloning is manipulating what has already been created. It aims to replace the natural reproduction process with a distorted version, allowing humans to control what they don’t naturally control. While these ideas establish a moral theory about the act or process of cloning, what does it mean to be a clone?
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro powerfully explores the theme of clones through the story of Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, who are students at an English countryside boarding school, Hailsham. As the narrative unfolds, the reader realises that Hailsham is composed of children who have been ‘created’ for the sole purpose of organ donation, in order to facilitate longevity in humans and cure diseases. After exiting Hailsham, the students are sent to different parts of England in boarding houses of sorts, till they reach the appropriate stage to become carers. Carers are those clones that look after the donors for a certain time period. After some time has passed carers eventually become donors until they have ‘completed’ (a euphemistic term used in the novel for dying) their purpose of organ donation. As children, the students are vaguely aware of what the future holds for them but not completely.
A constant theme in the book was identity and purpose. Even though Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were created to sustain the ‘life of another’, were they given the chance or allowed to live life in their own right and create their own purpose? There are instances in the book which highlight an ‘us v/s them’ environment, describing how some people squirmed in the presence of donors. One can assume that this sense of uneasiness came from the idea that the donors were not really ‘human’. However, schools like Hailsham tried to prove to the world that donors have humanity as well, they feel emotion, they experience love, anger, hate, jealousy, they also enjoy music and they too can create art. Hailsham was one of the very few schools that treated future donors with the prospect of humanising them for the world. Their aim was also to give them the best shot that they had at a normal life. There were institutions that treated future donors inhumanely in terms of the conditions that they were made to live in, almost handled like cattle.
Further, the story takes place in what is known as a ‘post-human’ world. Donna Haraway defined post-human as “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”. The donors are considered ‘organ banks’, or like machines from which certain parts can be extracted to improve the efficiency of another machine. Eventually, this idea, no matter how much a donor tries to run from it, becomes integrated with them. It really is an emotional realisation for the characters and readers to ascertain that Kathy, Ruth and Tommy cannot escape their reality no matter how much they try to prove their humanity.
One chapter follows the story of Ruth’s ‘possible’ (a clone's potential model or the human from whom their DNA was taken). Donors were always on the lookout for their ‘possibles’ in order to see what type of life they might have had if they weren't clones. Donors spotted their ‘possibles’ through similar mannerisms and behaviour. This storyline creates identity crises for the characters. Ruth experiences anger and frustration at the thought that she will not be able to work in a fancy office like she saw in an advertisement once. Kathy believes that her sexual appetite comes from being possibly modelled from a pornographic actress. These instances highlight how tethered their identities are to either the person they were cloned from or the people that they are going to donate to, they are not able to develop an understanding of themselves independently.
Towards the end of the novel, Kathy and Tommy attempt to evade the system by stating their love for one another, and essentially requesting more time till they have to ‘complete’ their purpose. Tommy even makes a collection of drawings to show to their former Hailsham teachers to convince them of giving a pardon. It’s as though they are trying to state their humanity, their will, in order to just ‘live’ for a little more time. I can’t help but ask, what do they have of their own, if not even their own lives? Not even their own souls?
Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were able to express their uneasiness and distraughtness through language, something that we do not share in common with animals. When we think about cloning animals, which is already a reality, do we hold the same sense of empathy for them? Does it then become about a difference in the degree of sentiency between living beings? Eventually, even though the three friends may not have wanted to end their lives through donations, they couldn’t escape what was decided for them, much like animals of today.
What did it mean for Dolly to be a clone? Was she a being in her own right? And does her creation threaten humanity?
Sarah Franklin, the author of ‘Dolly Mixtures’ explores how, “we can position a shape-shifting sheep within a broader discussion about kind and type, species and breed, sex and nation, empire and colony, capital and livestock—to all of which categories and identities Dolly’s existence adds a transformative element.”
The process of cloning Dolly was associated with the idea of humans obtaining the power of biological control. Her existence essentially defied heterosexuality; it in a way negated sex altogether to create life. Franklin states that, Wilmut’s claim that the birth of Dolly has ushered in ‘‘the age of biological control’’ was intended less as a boast than as a warning that the increasing ability to re-engineer life forms poses an ever greater social challenge to set the limits biology ‘‘itself’’ no longer provides. Additionally, what is significant about sex after Dolly according to Franklin, is not that existing definitions and formations of it have been transformed, but that they have been, in a sense, sampled, remixed, resequenced, and provided with a novel means of amplification. Sex, which was never pure to begin with, is further hybridized through technological assistance to create a form of mixed-sex, known as the Dolly technique. Sex, in the sense of a reproductive mechanism, has been disassembled and rearranged through processes of reversal, imitation, and transfer that allow it to be redeployed and redirected.
It is also interesting to think of how Never Let Me Go and the creation of Dolly takes place in Britain, a nation and people associated with imperialistic and industrial ambitions. Franklin comments, “One need only think briefly about the importance of the sheep and wool markets to the industrial revolution in Britain in the eighteenth century, or of the export of British animals to the new world to produce new markets as part of colonisation , to make the connection between Dolly, the British biotechnology industry, and the Australian outback.” Dolly’s land of origin symbolises or foreshadows the future where animals are commodified to a dangerous extent.
The commodification of animals is a serious problem today as well, with the advent of fast food, increasing population and demands, as well as the genesis of a wider network of poachers due to improved means of transportation and technology. However, there is still a sense of ‘scarcity’, or a fear of ‘extinction’. What if in the near future cloning becomes a quality and pace-wise efficient process? What if, scientists claim that animals that are in danger of extinction such as rhinos, tigers, silverback gorillas and so on can be cloned and repopulated? There is a very possible reality that such animals will face a mass culling for their meat, organs, skin and so on, simply because more can be made. Not only is the essence of the cloned animal being endangered but also the animals from which the clones were modelled.
‘ViaGen Pets and Equine’ is a biotech company in Texas, USA, that clones animals such as dogs, cats and horses. The cloning of pets has become increasingly common. Renowned actress Barbara Streissand revealed that she had cloned her dogs, she said, “It was easier to let Sammie go if I knew I could keep some part of her alive, something that came from her DNA.” Bioethicist Jessica Pierce has also argued against the practice, writing in the New York Times that the cloning industry has produced “a whole canine underclass that remains largely invisible to us but whose bodies serve as a biological substrate.” It creates an industry of farmed dogs according to Alexandra Horowitz, the head of Columbia University’s Canine Cognition Lab.
We can assume pets are being cloned because people are afraid and unable to deal with the pain of losing a companion, but does that allow us to bypass the sanctity of the animal’s life? One may argue that the pet does not know it is being cloned and hence the process doesn’t affect the original animal. Humans being the self-proclaimed superior and dominating species on this planet, should we not have the intelligence and the empathy to let ‘life’ happen and more importantly, respect life and the animals around us to lead their unique existence. We are also hindering what makes us human by avoiding pain, we are attempting to escape the essences of humanity for an ‘easier’ life. As Ian Flemming, the author of James Bond, would put it, ‘Live and Let Die’.
A part of what makes a relationship between two beings so powerful and precious is that it does not last forever. Every moment becomes something to remember and protect. The experiences we have with different living beings on this planet can not ever be exactly replicated. Even Streissand admitted, “You can clone the look of a dog, but you can’t clone the soul.”
By Rukmani Mrinalini Sen
Rukmani Mrinalini Sen is a student of sociology at Lady Shri Ram College.
References
Ishiguro, Kazuo (2005) Never Let Me Go. Faber and Faber.
Xiao, S. (2021) A Study on Never Let Me Go from the Perspective of Ethical Criticism. Open Access Library Journal, 8, 1-12.
Petrillo,Stephanie. Moral Theories and Cloning in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let me Go. Berkeley Undergraduate Journal.
Franklin,Sarah (2007) Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy. Duke University Press.
Brogan,Jacob (2018). The Real Reasons You Shouldn’t Clone Your Dog. Smithsonian Magazine
TED-Ed (2023). Ethical dilemma: What makes life worth living? - Douglas MacLean. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aEQDi2ZYCI&ab_channel=TED-Ed
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