Dolly was born on July 5, 1996, but her birth was not announced until the following February. In a piece deliciously titled “Irreplaceable Ewe” the following month, the biologist Ruth Hubbard wrote in The Nation:
Do we really want to manufacture animals on the assembly line and look on them not as live organisms but as relatively cheap factories that can yield profitable products? Generate people for spare parts? Achieve personal immortality? A baby is and always will be a person in her or his own right, not a commodity or a substitute for someone else.… If we are afraid of another Nazi empire trying to clone a master race (whether or not it’s scientifically feasible), we must destroy the political possibility that such an empire could arise. We can regulate and legislate the details. The fundamentals have to be part of our shared values about the kind of society in which we want to live.
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