Among the issues Heidi and Alvin Toffler raised as far back as their 1970 work, Future Shock, was the idea that cloning was soon to be possible, and that humans needed to start taking seriously its profound implications. Twenty-seven years later, they're still waiting. "Society has still not dealt with the ethical and legal problems involved with cloning." Heidi Toffler says. "What are we waiting for?"
Last Saturday's announcement that scientists had used the DNA of an adult sheep to successfully make a clone took many people by surprise, including those who have been theorizing about cloning and genetic engineering for years. Now that their speculations are coming true, the issues they've raised have become urgent. While PPL Therapeutics, the company that funded the clone research, watches its value soar, Gregory Stock, fellow at UCLA's Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life, is already planning a conference to discuss the vast implications of human germline engineering - the first of its kind.
"Those of us who are monitoring social change and the meaning of being human have a major agenda item planted right smack in front of us," Alvin Toffler says. "We have barely begun to absorb the impact of the third wave - and we're now facing the next ... [the fourth wave] combines information technology with the genetic advances that we've made into a completely new wave of social, political, religious, ethical, and legal changes."
Partly driving this discovery, as well as what direction it will take, are market forces. "It's telling that the first day's coverage of this issue was on page one of most newspapers, but since then the coverage has been on the business pages," says Alvin Toffler. "The pull, the demand for human organs and for human clones will build once it becomes clear that this is doable. The race is probably already on."
Stock also assumes that human cloning will soon become part of our lives. "Look what's happened to computers in 40 years, and to space and flight. Those have happened so much faster than ordinary, slow, evolutionary changes. Now the same processes that are affecting those changes are becoming applied to biology. The rate of biological change is just going to increase to match those other kinds of rates. When you look forward 200 years, we're going to be unrecognizable."
A scholar of evolution, Stock begins to sound more like a futurologist or sci-fi writer when theorizing about genetic manipulation. "We are becoming the objects of design processes," he says. "Life itself is becoming the object of the processes that have been operating in other realms and have caused such rapid progress."
By contrast, Jack Williamson, an 88-year-old seminal science-fiction writer, who first coined the phrase "genetic engineering" in his 1951 novel, Dragon's Island, seems more detached. When he was 7, Williamson's family moved to New Mexico in a covered wagon. In Dragon's Island, people travel in space ships that are grown from seeds. Williamson says he's not at all interested in making a clone of himself, but feels good about the things he envisioned coming true. "The future is unlimited, for good or bad."
Greg Bear, a science-fiction writer whose books often focus on genetic engineering, is similarly unimpressed. "We've watched it happen to frogs and carrots and mice, and now it's happening to sheep," he says. "I'm so used to reading and writing about it that to have it happen is almost anticlimactic."
True to science-fiction form, Bear prefers to look to the future and the practical struggles most have not yet imagined. "The thing that intrigues me is not just straightforward cloning, but what happens when you learn the whole grammar of DNA, the whole syntax and structure.... When we can do that, that gives us the whole Frankensteinian dilemma." Frankenstein, Bear says, was a terrible father. "Whenever we raise our children out of these processes we must be prepared to follow through. The problem becomes, what do we do with the failures?"
