Book summary “What We Talk About When We Talk About Clone Club”: summary

Introduction

You worry about the rapid advance of biotechnology and its threat to human identity. Popular culture fills your mind with dystopian images of mass-produced armies and sinister corporate control. Gregory E. Pence shows you that the reality of cloning is far removed from these science fiction tropes.

The book argues that human cloning and synthetic biology require rigorous bioethics instead of panicked prejudice. You will discover how science works, why historical eugenics fears do not apply, and how individual free will persists.

The text examines several core questions to guide your understanding:

• Do clones possess full moral status and personal identity?
• How do assisted reproduction and somatic cell nuclear transfer actually work?
• Can you separate legitimate bioethical concerns from anti-science hysteria?

1. Personhood and Our Fears of Clones

Clones possess full human rights and personal identity, while cultural fears are driven by science fiction tropes rather than biological reality.

How a human baby is created does not affect its status as a person. You should treat people equally regardless of their biological origins. Conservative bioethicists and popular culture often portray clones as subhuman. Modern ethical theory dictates that differential treatment requires morally relevant reasons.

Just as children born from assisted reproduction or unmarried parents are full persons, individuals created via cloning possess the same human rights. You can call this the Principle of Non-Discrimination by Origins.

Sarah Manning and her clone sisters in Orphan Black display complex fears, ambitions, and loves, proving they are real humans rather than mindless zombies.

Personhood and Human Clones

Creating a cloned twin solely to serve as a spare parts warehouse for organ harvesting violates fundamental moral rules against murder and using people as mere means. Even if a clone owes its existence entirely to a genetic source, forcing it to surrender organs against its will is ethically identical to forcing a healthy identical twin to donate a kidney. Immanuel Kant's principle forbids treating any person merely as a means to sustain another's life.

Fictional works like The Island and Never Let Me Go depict clones raised in luxury only to be harvested for organs, a fate that constitutes plain and simple murder. In 1954, the first live adult kidney donation took place between identical twins.

Our Fears of Clones

Popular views and deep-seated prejudices against human cloning are heavily driven by cultural fantasies and science fiction literature rather than actual scientific facts. Government advisory panels and legal scholars note that literary tropes shape public perception. The United States government's Human Research Embryo Panel report of 1994 highlighted these concerns.

Literary tropes create four primary fears:

• exploitation as slaves or soldiers;
• clones becoming superhuman and turning on their makers;
• scientific arrogance motivated by greed;
• narcissistic replication by parents.

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner portrays replicants who look and feel human but are exploited as slave labor and hunted by police. The television show Orphan Black features the Clone Club and Projects Leda and Castor, drawing directly from the Greek myth of Leda. In mythology, Zeus seduced Leda in the form of a swan, resulting in offspring from different unions. Sarah and Helena correspond to the twins produced by Leda's union with Zeus, manifesting extraordinary physical resilience and healing abilities.

Attempts to clone historical figures stem from an amoral or evil desire to resurrect dangerous figures from the past. Environmental differences would yield different personalities in any such creation. In The Boys from Brazil, Nazi-hunter Lieberman discovers a plot where Josef Mengele clones ninety-four copies of Hitler to recreate the dictator. Differing parenting styles, locales, and environments invariably produce completely different adult personalities, making exact psychological replication unrealistic.

The major source of objections to human cloning is religious unease rooted in the belief that only God should decide how and when babies come into existence. Critics argue that cloning represents secular manufacturing that replaces God's hidden hand with conscious human choices. While sexual reproduction involves a genetic roulette wheel that allows believers to imagine divine guidance, cloning foregrounds human decision-making and selection, which critics label as playing God.

Father Richard A. McCormick argued that humans are made in the image of God in their irreplaceable uniqueness, viewing cloning as an unacceptable intrusion into divine creation.

2. Cloning Science and Synthetic Biology

Assisted reproduction and cloning rest on somatic cell nuclear transfer and stem cell advances, raising complex ethical questions across different philosophical frames.

Assisted reproduction and cloning faced severe public backlash and early skepticism similar to historical resistance against other scientific breakthroughs.

When Louise Brown was born in 1978 via in vitro fertilization, Nobel Prize-winning scientists like James Watson and Max Perutz condemned the breakthrough, predicting deformed babies and state-raised children. Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards helped create Louise Brown, the first child produced by in vitro fertilization in 1978. Max Perutz and James Watson won Nobel Prizes in 1962.

Cloning and Stem Cells

Cloning encompasses several distinct techniques, with somatic cell nuclear transfer ultimately enabling Ian Wilmut to produce Dolly the sheep. Cloning can refer to molecular cloning, cellular cloning, embryo twinning, or somatic cell nuclear transfer. Ian Wilmut successfully created Dolly by synchronizing the cell cycle phases of donor nuclei and enucleated eggs to prevent mitotic breakdown.

Ian Wilmut started with 277 sheep embryos to produce just one surviving lamb, Dolly, born in the summer of 1996 and announced in February 1997. Out of those attempts, 29 embryos lived a few weeks, 13 resulted in fetuses, and 3 lambs grew to near birth size.

Stem cell research evolved from harvesting scarce embryonic cells to reprogramming adult somatic cells into pluripotent stem cells. John Gearhart and James Thomson discovered how to create immortalized embryonic stem cell lines in 1998, while Shinya Yamanaka discovered in 2007 how to use four genes to revert skin cells into induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells without destroying embryos. In Orphan Black, adult stem cells are harvested from Kira's bone marrow by Delphine and a pediatrician to treat Cosima's respiratory illness.

Cloning primates and humans presents major biological obstacles, including improper chromosome counts and defective mitotic spindle proteins. Researchers discovered that removing an egg's nucleus damages the NuMA and HSET spindle proteins responsible for guiding chromosomes during cell division, causing primate embryos to fail during gestation. A research team at Oregon Health & Science University successfully created a primate stem cell line using the Oosight machine, but none of the seventy-seven transferred embryos completed gestation to birth. Among these, all primate fetuses miscarried before the 25-day limit.

Clones inherit mitochondrial genes from the host egg, which can harbor devastating inheritable diseases or cause severe physiological defects. Host eggs contain thirty-7 genes within their mitochondria, compared to a total of 20000 to 25000 human genes. Faulty mitochondrial DNA or chromosomal reassembly errors can lead to degenerative conditions similar to those affecting the Ledas and Castors, even though 99.9815 percent of genetic material comes from the nuclear DNA ancestor. Scientists in England and other regions have utilized mitochondria replacement therapy to swap diseased maternal mitochondria with healthy donor mitochondria.

Fatal neurodegenerative disorders in clones can resemble spongiform encephalopathies transmitted by self-reproducing protein pathogens known as prions. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and related transmissible spongiform encephalopathies destroy brain tissue, leaving sponge-like holes and causing rapid cellular death. Stanley Prusiner received a 1997 Nobel Prize for proving that prions transmit lethal encephalopathies that resist standard sterilization methods. D. Carleton Gajdusek shared a 1976 Nobel Prize for proving CJD transmissibility.

Ethics of Synthetic Biology

Four distinct philosophical frames shape how you evaluate synthetic biology and biotechnology:

• naturalism, which seeks ecological purity and opposes border crossings;
• globalism, which trusts free markets and patent protections;
• transhumanism, which believes science should improve human life and cure disease;
• egalitarianism, which argues that biotechnology exacerbates social injustice and corporate exploitation.

Craig Venter announced the creation of a synthetic cell named Synthia in 2010, sparking intense debate across these different philosophical perspectives.

Modern synthetic biology utilizes advanced gene-editing tools like CRISPR and high-throughput sequencers, raising urgent questions about safety and social justice. Technologies like CRISPR allow affordable, garage-scale gene editing, making regulatory control difficult while concentrating immense power and commercial ownership in corporate hands. Super-sequencers nicknamed Wonder Woman, Batman, and Electra at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology analyze trillions of base pairs per run, contributing to workflows highlighted by WIRED magazine in 2015 when describing the Genesis Engine.

3. Eugenics, Patents, and Clonal Identity

DNA tags or expressed sequence tags can mark gene locations, and biotechnology companies have sought patents on them and human gene sequences. ESTs identify longer DNA strands. The US Supreme Court in Diamond v. Chakrabarty ruled that modified organisms can be patented, prompting researchers like Craig Venter and agencies like the NIH to seek patents on human DNA fragments. Critics condemned this as a genetic land grab that privatized nature.

Biotech company Amgen obtained a patent for a missing protein gene in renal failure patients and earned $400 million in 1991. Human DNA contains 3 billion base pairs across 23 pairs of chromosomes, which were once thought to house 140,000 genes.

Holding a patent on a gene or DNA tag does not confer ownership of the actual human being or natural gene segments. US patent law stems from Article I, section 8, clause 8 of the Constitution to promote science by granting temporary monopoly rights while making underlying information public. Patents confer partial rights over creation processes rather than physical ownership of the living organism or universal extraction rights. Patents grant a 20 years exclusion period from the date of filing.

Eugenics and Clonal Dynasties

State-coerced eugenics programs in North America aimed to improve populations through selective breeding and compulsory sterilization. Originating in North America, the eugenics movement was driven by social Darwinism and deep-rooted racism, leading to the forced sterilization of thousands of institutionalized or minority citizens under laws upheld by the Supreme Court.

Carrie Buck was sterilized under a Virginia law upheld by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell after being deemed feeble-minded following a rape. Nazis sterilized 225,000 mental defectives, while 36,000 Americans faced sterilization by 1941. Officials sterilized 7,600 Carolinians between 1929 and 1972, and 3,000 Canadians underwent procedures under Alberta's Sterilization Act. The Cold River Institute and the Eugenics Record Office supported the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924.

Historical eugenics relied on flawed scientific assumptions regarding genetics, recessive inheritance, and population averages. Eugenicists falsely assumed single genes caused complex social behaviors, ignored recessive inheritance patterns, misunderstood evolutionary timelines, and failed to account for environmental influences, mutation, and regression to the mean.

Future reproductive cloning could enable wealthy families to create biological dynasties through voluntary and private means.

Unlike public and coercive state eugenics, family-directed evolution or stealth eugenics uses assisted reproduction to pass down advantageous traits and property across generations, potentially intensifying social and biological inequality. A Louisiana veterinarian spent $100,000 to clone his beloved dog.

Nature, Nurture, and Clonal Identity

Studies of identical twins separated at birth provide key insights into the relative influence of genetics versus upbringing. Research on identical twins reveals significant similarities in personality, interests, and adult characteristics even when raised in different environments, highlighting the powerful role of genetics. The Minnesota Twin Family Study follows 8,000 identical twins to analyze traits of genetic versus environmental origin, pointing to a 50 percent chance of twins being alike as adults despite genetic essentialism.

Clones are not strictly identical down to the molecular and chromosomal level due to cellular complexity and mitochondrial contributions. Cloned embryos exhibit variations from molecular probabilities, distinct mitochondrial DNA from host eggs, random X-chromosome inactivation, and genetic imprinting, ensuring natural individual differences. Mitochondrial DNA provides less than 1 percent of overall genes, while cow milk production showed a 70 percent match prediction.

Epigenetic modifications and environmental factors alter gene expression, causing genetically identical clones to develop distinct phenotypes.

Histone protein layers wrap DNA and respond to environmental triggers like diet, stress, and gestation conditions, activating or silencing genes to shape the final organism. Caloric restriction, a survival diet limit of 1,800 calories a day, and consuming green tea and red grapes can modify gene expression and support telomere maintenance.

4. Sexuality, Chimerism, and Ethics of Reproduction

Parental motives and individual autonomy matter far more than biological methods of conception, while twins and chimeras reveal the complex nuances of human identity.

Sexuality and Gender Identity

Genetically identical clones can express widely differing sexual orientations and gender identities due to environmental nuances and developmental factors. Although the Leda sisters share the same core DNA, factors such as prenatal hormone exposure, mitochondrial DNA, distinct womb environments, and early childhood experiences create a wide fan of potential outcomes for adult sexuality and gender presentation.

In Orphan Black, the Leda clones include Sarah who is heterosexual, Cosima who is a lesbian, and Tony who is a transgender man.

Evelyn Hooker's landmark 1957 psychological study proved no major mental health differences between homosexual and heterosexual individuals, contributing to the removal of homosexuality from the DSM. Evelyn Hooker used the Rorschach, Thematic Apperception, and Make-a-Picture-Story Tests in her 1957 research. Research by J. Michael Bailey and Richard Pillard documented a 52 percent concordance rate for sexual orientation among identical twins, dropping to 22 percent for same-sex fraternal twins and 11 percent for non-twin siblings. Later research by Bailey found lower concordance rates of 20 percent for men and 24 percent for women, proving that non-genetic factors strongly contribute.

Chimeras and Chimerism

Chimerism occurs when an organism contains genetically distinct cells from two different people, frequently resulting from the absorption of a vanishing twin in the womb. Vanishing twin syndrome occurs in 20 to 30 percent of multiple pregnancies when a twin dies and is miscarried or its fetal tissue is absorbed by the surviving twin. In rare cases, whole chromosomes are absorbed, resulting in a chimera who carries two distinct sets of DNA.

Kendall Malone in Orphan Black and real-life Lydia Fairchild and Karen Keegan are documented chimeras who absorbed a twin in utero.

Approximately 1 percent of children are born with genital or genetic anomalies. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia is an autosomal recessive disease where babies lack an adrenal enzyme, causing overproduction of androgens and resulting in ambiguous genitalia in female fetuses alongside salt wasting. Kendall Malone carries a Y chromosome and is technically intersex, while Maria New developed prenatal dexamethasone to prevent ambiguous genitalia in congenital adrenal hyperplasia fetuses.

Ethics of Cloning and Identity

When evaluating the ethics of human reproduction, including cloning and assisted reproduction, parental motives matter far more than the method of conception. Critics often argue against cloning by assuming bad parental motives or that a cloned child's future is completely closed by expectations. Assisted reproduction and cloning ensure children are deliberately wanted, whereas traditional sexual reproduction can result from accidental or negligent circumstances. Just as with natural conception, bad motives harm children while good motives nurture them.

Parents of conjoined twins Abby and Brittany Hensel taught their children that societal prejudice was an external problem rather than an internal flaw.

Psychologist Joan Friedman defines the twin mystique as the unhealthy cultural assumption that identical twins must share every aspect of life as a single entity. Raised together, multiples often face enmeshment, codependency, and rigid role assignments that stifle individuality unless separation and autonomy are consciously and freely chosen in adulthood. Identical twins attending the Twinsburg, Ohio festival sometimes realize they have no friends outside their twin, prompting difficult separations.

5. Group Identity, Free Will, and Institutional Control

Human beings exercise real free will and elbow room despite strong environmental pressures, institutional control, and group conflict dynamics.

Group Identity

Kwame Anthony Appiah uses the Robbers Cave experiment to argue that social identity precedes culture. Group culture and hostility arise only after a social identity is formed in response to conflict. Appiah outlines four aspects of social identity:

• a social conception of the group;
• a name or label;
• internalization of the label;
• a pattern of behavior by others toward the group.

In the early 1950s, researchers placed twenty-two white, middle-class boys aged eleven or twelve into two groups at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. Once competition was introduced, the groups named themselves Eagles and Rattlers, developed hostile rivalries, and formed proud group identities within four days.

This framework explains how both Leda and Castor clones are classified by outsiders and adopt their identity. Alison explains her cloned identity to Sarah in season one, marking the early psychological internalization of the Leda label.

Free Will and Institutional Control

Philosophers distinguish between fatalism, determinism, indeterminism, incompatibilism, and compatibilism. Compatibilism holds that determinism can be true while you still possess a range of free will and real choices, referred to as elbow room. Daniel Dennett argues that the freedom worth having does not require choosing everything about yourself, but simply having real choices in action. Cloned individuals face strong genetic and psychological expectations, but self-awareness and reflection allow you to exercise free will.

Helena is imprisoned and heavily controlled by various groups, yet she manages to hoard butter packets and execute an escape, demonstrating freedom through action.

Michel Foucault argued that institutions like prisons, schools, mental hospitals, and religious organizations use rules, surveillance, and categorization to create pliant, docile bodies. Characters like Helena experience this control directly through orphanages, cult compounds, and corporate monitoring, but ultimately achieve freedom by resisting these structures. Henrik and the New World Proletheans use religious doctrine as a ruse to control followers and women, punishing dissent brutally, such as when Henrik sews his daughter Gracie's mouth shut.

Future storylines for clone narratives can draw naturally on real-world medical and bioethical dilemmas, such as organ transplantation, genetic matching, and human-animal hybrids. Because clones share identical or nearly identical genetic profiles, they present unique narrative and ethical scenarios rooted in medical science. Jodi Picoult's novel My Sister's Keeper explores the bioethics of savior siblings created as organ donors, a dynamic that could apply to genetically identical clones sharing 99 percent of their DNA.

10 Key Ideas

1. Clones possess full human rights and personal identity, while cultural fears are driven by science fiction tropes rather than biological reality.
2. Assisted reproduction and cloning faced severe public backlash and early skepticism similar to historical resistance against other scientific breakthroughs.
3. Holding a patent on a gene or DNA tag does not confer ownership of the actual human being or natural gene segments.
4. Future reproductive cloning could enable wealthy families to create biological dynasties through voluntary and private means.
5. Epigenetic modifications and environmental factors alter gene expression, causing genetically identical clones to develop distinct phenotypes.
6. Genetically identical clones can express widely differing sexual orientations and gender identities due to environmental nuances and developmental factors.
7. Chimerism occurs when an organism contains genetically distinct cells from two different people, frequently resulting from the absorption of a vanishing twin in the womb.
8. Parental motives and individual autonomy matter far more than biological methods of conception, while twins and chimeras reveal the complex nuances of human identity.
9. Human beings exercise real free will and elbow room despite strong environmental pressures, institutional control, and group conflict dynamics.
10. Institutions like prisons, schools, mental hospitals, and religious organizations use rules, surveillance, and categorization to create pliant, docile bodies.