The Bioethics of Individual Human Identity: Cloning and the Potential Erasure of the Human Fingerprint (Book Review‪)‬

Human Cloning and Human Dignity:The Report of the President's Council on Bioethics, Leon R. Kass, M.D., Chairman, 350 pp. New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2002. In the 1932 novel, A Brave New World, Aldous Huxley imagined a future when identical human beings would be technologically manufactured in batches using a fictitious "Bokanovsky Process." Modern science, warned Huxley, could one day be responsible for alleviating all suffering, disease, and sadness. As a side effect, however, human beings would be stripped of their freedoms, individualities, and personal identities. The possibility of a factory-style mass production of the human species disturbs our very deepest conceptions of humanity and personhood. The willful cloning of genetically identical beings through innovations of human intellection not only calls into question identity on the level of the individual, but begs questions concerning the cosmic "place' of the entire race.