"Edward L. Ferman - Best From F&SF, 23rd Edition" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ferman Edward L)

Why bother? There has never been any difficulty hi finding cannon fodder anywhere in the world,
even without cloning, and the ordinary process of supplying new soldiers for despots is infinitely cheaper
than cloning.
More reasonably, it could be argued that the clone of a great human being would retain his genetic
equipment and, therefore, would be another great human being of the same kind. In that case, the chief
use of cloning would be to reproduce genius.
That, I think, would be a waste of time. We are not necessarily going to breed thousands of
transcendent geniuses out of an Einstein or thousands of diabolical villains out of a Hitler.
After all, a human being is more than his genes. Your clone is the result of your nucleus being placed
into a foreign egg cell and the foreign cytoplasm in that egg cell will surely have an effect on the
development of the clone. The egg will have to be implanted into a foreign womb and that, too, will have
an influence on the development of the organism.
Even if a woman were to have one of her somatic nuclei implanted into one of her own egg cells and
if she were then to have the egg cell implanted into me womb of her own mother (who, we will assume, is
still capable of bearing a child), the new organism will be born into different circumstances and that would
have an effect on its personality, too.
For instance, suppose you wanted one hundred Isaac Asimovs so that the supply of F&SF essays
would never run out. You would then have to ask what it was that made me the kind of writer I am or a
writer at all. Was it only my genes?
I was brought op in a candy store under a father of the old school who, although he was Jewish, was
the living embodiment of the Protestant ethic. My nose was kept to the grindstone until I could no longer
remove it Furthermore, I was brought up during the Great Depression and had to find a way of making a
livingтАФor I would inherit the candy store, which I desperately didn't want to do. Furthermore, I lived in a
time when science fiction magazines, and pulp magazines generally, were going strong, and when a young
man could sell clumsily written stories because the demand was greater than the supply.
Put it all together, they spell M-E.
The Isaac Asimov clones, once they grow op, simply won't live in the same social environment I did,
won't be subjected to the same pressures, won't have the same opportunities. What's more, when I
wrote, I just wroteтАФno one expected anything particular from me. When my clones write, their products
will always be compared to the Grand Original and that would discourage and wipe out anyone.
The end result will be that though my clones, or some of them, might turn out to be valuable citizens
of one kind or another, it would be very unlikely that any one of them would be another Isaac Asimov,
and their production would not be worthwhile. Whatever good they might do would not be worth the
reduction they would represent in the total gene variability of humanity.
Yet cloning would not be totally useless, either. There would be the purely theoretical advantage of
studying the development of embryos with known variations in their genes which, except for those
variations, would have identical genetic equipment (This would raise serious ethical questions, as all
human experimentation does, but that is not the issue at the moment)
Then, too, suppose it were possible to learn enough about human embryonic development to guide
embryos into all sorts of specialized bypaths that would produce a kind of monster that had a full-sized
heart, with all else vestigial, or a full-sized kidney or lung or liver or leg. With just one organ developing,
techniques of forced growth (in the laboratory, of course, and not in a human womb) might make
development to full size a matter of months only.
We can therefore imagine that at birth, every human individual will have scrapings taken from his little
toe, thus attaining a few hundred living cells that can be at once frozen for possible eventual use. (This is
done at birth, because the younger the cell, the more efficiently it is likely to clone.)
These cells could serve as potential organ banks for the future. H the time were to come when an
adult found he had a limping heart or fading pancreas or whatever, or if a leg had been lost in an accident
or had had to be amputated, then those long-frozen cells would be defrosted and put into action.
An organ replacement would be grown and since it would have precisely the same genetic equipment