A Clone of Your Own?

Someday soon (if it hasn’t happened in secret already), a human will be cloned, and mankind will embark on a scientific and moral journey whose destination cannot be foretold. In A Clone of Your Own?, Arlene Judith Klotzko describes the new world of possibilities that can be glimpsed over the horizon. In a lucid and engaging narrative, she explains that the technology to create clones of living beings already exists, inaugurated in 1996 by Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from a single adult cell. Scientists have since cloned mice, cows, goats, pigs, rabbits, horses, rats, a cat and a mule. Using the same laboratory tools and techniques, other researchers are trying to grow embryos, cloned from a single cell of a human being. In riveting prose, full of allusions to literature, psychology, art, music, and the cinema, Klotzko shows why the prospect of human cloning triggers our dearest hopes and especially our darkest fears, forcing us to ponder anew what it means to be human. And what it would be like to have ‘a clone of your own’.