Ethical questions about somacloning (as I call the production of cloning of adult animals using the somatic cell nuclear transfer or SCNT technique) are tied closely both to unresolved scientific questions and to fundamental issues in ethical theory.

On the scientific side, it is still unclear why the success rate is so low and there are still questions about the health of somaclones, including whether telomere shortening will cause premature senescence. These empirical uncertainties affect normative evaluations of the technology from an animal welfare perspective, because it is still unclear how healthy somaclones are likely to be. But also, it is unclear how to evaluate the low success rate without assuming an answer to a fundamental philosophical question about the moral (ir)relevance of merely potential (as yet unactualized) capacities. Famously, the Wilmut team did 277 nuclear transfers on the way to producing Dolly, and subsequent somacloning projects with mice, cattle, and swine have had similarly low success rates. In dismissing the large number of "wasted" animal embryos as morally inconsequential, we assume that merely potential capacities are morally irrelevant, an answer which critically favors a pro-choice stance on the abortion issue and raises questions about the permissibility of infanticide.

Thus somacloning is a paradigm example of a technology developing on the scientific and philosophical frontiers -- the remaining scientific questions are crucially important to its evaluation ethically, and in evaluating certain aspects of the technology in certain ways we assume answers to important philosophical issues, answers which may not jibe with the answers we give to other ethical questions.

Keywords: ethics, animal welfare, animal rights, cloning

Back to my vita.