Life After Death

died soon after birth and had malformed internal organs. All but one of the five cloned lambs were 20% larger than they should have been - and one lamb grew to twice the normal size. It had to be delivered by caesarean section. Suppression of the full story - of the truth - serves tyranny, not science, and certainly not good ethics. Experimentation thrives on waste and rejection. Individuality is of no significance. Cloning and molecular genetics will undoubtedly violate the delicate balance in nature. Greed to make more money out of unnaturally engineered, but commercially productive, animals will introduce new diseases into the human race.

Mad Cow's Disease is our first glimpse into this abyss.

The Genetic Underclass In addition, a genetic underclass - a new caste system - of the uninsured will emerge. Genetic screening-out on grounds of IQ, sexuality, behavioural traits or disability will be demanded by consumers, insurers, State planners and politicians.

Domestic eugenics will lead to the State's suppressing variation as it seeks to control reproduction. The State will simply create, asexually, an infinite number of copies. Governments like the Chinese - whose population policies have been funded by Britain to the tune of millions of pounds over the past ten years - will extend their existing coercive practices of forced abortion, forced sterilisation, and their one-child policy. In Britain it will be more subtle but just as deadly.

The Coming Peril This is the coming peril, in all its unrelieved hideousness.

Genetic privacy laws and the strongest possible ethical challenge to this genetic catastrophe are urgently needed. The moral issues and dilemmas posed by this challenge cannot simply be left in the hands of scientists - many of whom seem to think that just because something is possible makes it right. To control these developments we will require something more than the lamentable Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Domestic eugenics, naturally packaged with all the decorum which modern public relations can muster, will lead to routine testing of every pregnancy, raising ethical, and therefore political questions, every bit as complex as the bioethical and scientific ones. If genetic testing becomes routine, then many people will find themselves excluded from the ranks of the insurable, or else asked to pay prohibitively high premiums for conditions which they cannot prevent and may not develop. The absence of proper privacy laws and protection of confidentiality also means it is entirely unclear who should and who should not have access to genetic information: GPs, families, insurance companies - they may all claim rights of access. Who and how are we to decide?

Pandora's Box The only people seriously considering these questions at the present time are the people with colossal vested interests. Therapeutically, gene therapy is going nowhere except to accelerate the 40 million annual abortions already taking place worldwide. (Brian Appleyard, Abortion: Time to Think Again, The Independent,