Conscious Choice: Ichabodies

October 2000

Ichabodies

or, The Tail of the Headless Clones

by H. Peter Steeves, Ph.D.

If they were just Halloween stories there wouldn’t be much to worry about. But news of the arrival of the clones has been with us for a few years now. First there was Dolly the sheep; followed by some possibly mutated mice. And then we learn that the headless clones are alive and well in England, where scientists have managed to create a frog embryo that is all tail.

It is a modern monster story, where clean, fluorescently-lit academic facilities stand in for musty castle laboratories. Through a sort of genetic decapitation, the English tadpoles’ DNA has been adjusted such that the growth of a head has been suppressed. Apart from this, the frog embryos are normal. (Whatever that could possibly mean for a headless frog.) And now the talk is that the headless human could come next.

Jonathan Slack, an embryologist at Bath University, assures us that the genetic manipulation needed to produce a headless human would be similar and similarly easy. The result? Headless human clones that could grow replacement organs and tissue needed for transplant surgery — body factories providing exact genetic matches for the patient because the donor would be, in fact, an exact copy of the donee...except for being headless, of course.

To make matters more complicated, in last fall’s issue of Scientific American Presents it was suggested that we are nearing the point when human head transplants will be possible. Now if we could only combine the two technologies: not just a warehouse for separate organs, headless donor bodies could come as a complete package, grown specifically to be grafted onto your waiting head (once it has been removed, of course, from your unwanted, old body). Imagine the business opportunities for supermodels! By growing headless clones of themselves, we could all become beautiful. ("You look just like Heidi Klum in that bikini!" "I should. I’m wearing her body!") And when the head-next-door can so easily be grafted onto the headless clone of a male porno star, we will once and for all stop associating cloning with Everyman’s desire for a mini-me.

It is amazing how up front most scientists are about their lack of concern over the ethics of all this. In England, the headless-frog scientists smilingly announced their joy over having found a "loophole" in ethics and law. Without a brain or a functioning central nervous system, it is argued that the organisms they create will not be true embryos, thus harvesting their organs or using their bodies in any manner could not be wrong.

But let’s consider this. Clearly, if I were to be cloned, wait for my clone to grow up, and then kill him and take his liver for a transplant or take his body for my own, I would be acting immorally. If, however, a liver by itself could be grown from cloned cells, many would see nothing wrong with this. Growing a headless body to act as a storage site for organs is, supposedly, something in-between, but it is more like the latter case — more like growing a liver in isolation — since that liver would belong only to a body and not to a full person.

A headless human clone might make a great postmodern Ichabod Crane trick-or-treat costume, and a headless human donor may provide a liver for a much needed transplant, but this does not necessarily make such research right or good. Rather than pursue these important points, though, I propose that we first think about the assumptions at work in a world that accepts such research as inevitable or even possibly appropriate.

Specific conditions need to hold for a culture to separate a body from a person — to see a body as just a body, just a receptacle for organs. Science, after Galileo, brought about a world view in which everything, including the body, could be explained mechanically: the heart is seen as a pump, the urinary tract is akin to plumbing, the brain is like a computer. As the technological world view became deeply imbedded in Western culture, the heart was not only understood as a pump, it became a pump — treated and attended to as such. Metaphor and a culturally biased description of function became the only available description of truth. Consequently, the heart not only becomes a pump, it becomes just a pump. Only with such a technological world view could a culture come to envision a bionic man, Pacemakers, Pamela Anderson’s on-again off-again breasts, and The Borg.

But we are our bodies. We do not own them, as we might own a bike or an article of clothing. To be human is to be corporeal: all of our experiences are from the perspective of our bodies. If I rest my arm on the kitchen table, it is never next to the plate in the way in which the spoon is next to the plate. When a mosquito stings me, I do not need to fumble around, searching for the place he has stung — my hand moves there with ease. The body is the site of being human. This is something that the technological world view cannot account for and thus suppresses.

If it becomes possible to create human bodies without heads, will these legitimately be non-persons? As the computing site, the head is often seen as the center of consciousness and awareness, but this does not do justice to our everyday experience. So much knowledge — so much consciousness — is in the body. Think of the way our hands type correctly when we could not even begin to recite the letters on the keyboard in their proper order. The way the body balances on a bicycle even as we are unable to articulate how, exactly, it is done. The ease with which the arms, hands, fingers, and feet of the pianist move through space as she plays the piece of music, not so much from a mental memory as from a body memory. We are bodies; we are bodies that know and feel and experience and live.

Inevitably, hospital wards of headless clones do more than provide a cheap holiday thrill. They call on us to question who and what we are. And such debate is the responsibility of being human, for nothing we do is truly inevitable.

H. Peter Steeves, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University.

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