But then we're not twins, or clones—and surely this, the Love Factor, is a term that's conspicuously missing from our modern debate over the ethics and wisdom of human cloning. In most of our weirdly limited discussions of this supposedly pressing issue, clones are talked about as victims. Is it ethical, we wonder, to breathe life into a creature without its own identity, without (perhaps) a soul, who will never know the quintessential human joy of Feeling Different? What we forget is that in all likelihood clones will be tackling these rather straightforward existential puzzles arm in arm with one or more people who not only know exactly what they're going through but who love them, arguably more than anyone ever has or will love us. The implications of this are multiple. But one of them, surely, is that there might be a lot more clones around than we're banking on. If there's a more powerful force in the universe than love, it's Love Enhanced By Technology,

and if clones really do adore each other as much as twins do—and some of the outfits in Twinsburg, seriously, only love can explain—it's hard to imagine that they wouldn't plow every farthing of disposable income into multiplying the flock.

At which point, or shortly after, we would be living in a very different society. For one thing, there might be more war. Think how much trouble is caused today by people whose only bond is one adaptation of the thousands of religions out there. Imagine a million young men with identical genes, identical scraggly little beards, hearing on their identical answering machines that a million other identical men may or may not have gotten fresh with their million identical sisters.

Then again, maybe peace would reign. The second thing one notices while staggering with mounting unease through a biblical horde of twins, is that they wuv other twins nearly as much as each other. Their favorite activity seems to be spotting other extremely identical twins and asking them to pose for a photo. The centerpiece of the Twinsburg festival was a giant tent where a disembodied voice—rather reminiscent, I felt, of the recorded last remarks of Jim Jones—was calling twins to the stage above a sludge of constant applause and awarding prizes to the most identical.


There was a larger ideology here, I sensed, reeling away in muted horror, a sort of pan-Twinism that would, if greatly magnified by the advent of human cloning, possibly postpone its internecine bloodbath until it had dealt with the rest of us.
But then, this is just my paranoia. It's easy to become paranoid after a day spent wandering through a leafy exurban hamlet filled with genetically identical humans. It's easy to get entirely creeped out in the twin festival's "research" enclosure watching an identical pair of slim brunettes postpone taking a bite of their identical clouds of cotton candy until students from the Ohio State University College of Dentists have finished measuring their gums.

I wonder, frankly, if Dr. Prainsack would ever dare make the trip here, or if she's more comfortable back home in Vienna, with her schnitzel, her grad students, and the close, angelic harmonies of the Boys' Choir silk-screening a sheen upon the evening sky. "Clones would feel individuality," she declares from the safety of her fortress of strudel.

As one who has spent a day toting his own individuality like an overfull chalice, only to find them at the Holiday Inn monopolizing the pool table and refusing even to consider sleeping with anyone who spent his time in the womb alone, I can tell you that if Prainsack is correct, those individuality-burdened freaks of nature, as yet unborn, are to be pitied.

Read Barbara Prainsack's response to this article.

Previous Blinded by Science columns:

Who's Freaky Now?
(October, 2006)

Hawking's Exit Strategy
(September, 2006)

The Last Days of Gossip
(August, 2006)

The Ways of All Flesh
(July, 2006)

Nightmare of Divided Loyalties
(June, 2006)

What Were We Thinking?
(May, 2006)