Support for parental cloning

The debate over the virtues of human cloning has bogged down into “us” and “them” camps because we’re focusing on the wrong end of the problem. The question isn’t whether we should be using cloning to produce children. The real challenge for science, and one we can all celebrate, is how to create carbon copy parents.

Every embryologist knows that all of the fancy pipette work of somatic cell transfer can pale against the Everest-like challenge of trying to find a babysitter on the Friday night of your 10th anniversary. Listen-up folks in the lab coats: it’s time to shift the research from prenatal screening to the pleas coming from parental screaming.

There’s no doubt that an identical duplicate dad or mom would do wonders around the house.
Family life with young children is a series of challenges that are akin to creating bench-top cold fusion on demand. Theoretically impossible, yet somehow still attempted, and even expected by some.

There’s the classic Solomon-esque decision of who gets to sit on my lap during story time. If my son gets there first, my daughter complains. If she’s the first pick, my son mopes away, shoulders stooped.

Or how about the early morning multiple-accident scenario. The toilet training kid pees on the living room carpet at exactly the same time as the energized four-year-old forcefully dings his head on the corner of the kitchen table. The soundtrack is the dog whimpering insistently by the front door. Your spouse is in the shower.

These situations beg for a third parent. Maybe even a fourth.

Here’s a scientific challenge that we can all revel in. For political conservatives and religious fundamentalists a cloned third parent is a reinforcement of the nuclear family.

An additional cloned parent is the only hope for parents who’ve broken the “don’t let your kids outnumber you” rule. The thing is, for most couples it’s only too easy to make kids. The research emphasis has been on solving a problem for a tiny proportion of the population while the major issue of not enough parents is disregarded.

However, it’s easy to understand why the best scientific minds have shied away from more and better parents and focused on making kids. It’s a lot easier. Parents are notoriously difficult to work with. While they replicate well enough on their own, put them in a room with someone prodding at them with a high-tech medical probe and they’re more than likely to talk about their fundamental human rights and whether someone could get them a coffee, or how about a low-fat latte?

Cloning a parent, holus-bolus, would be the unequivocal basis for a Nobel Prize in medicine, or even math, or maybe peacekeeping. It would also correct one of Alfred Nobel’s few failings in the creation of his famous awards. A brilliant scientist himself, Nobel would have shown himself an all round genius had he created a family-related series of awards. How about the single parent with three of more children prize. Or the award for parents of twins who then have a handicapped child.

So, biologists, here is your new holy grail—the carbon copy parent. And please. Hurry.