Perfect Copy – Nicholas Agar ****

To clone or not to clone, that is the question. Or at least, that’s the question addressed in Nicholas Agar’s clear and well written book.

He starts from the science of cloning. Pretty well all of us have opinions about the whole business without having a clue about what’s actually involved. The science isn’t as straightforward as you might think (so perhaps its no surprise it’s so difficult). For example, it’s not widely understood that the famous cloned sheep Dolly is actually less of a clone than a perfectly normal identical twin. The identical twins share the same DNA (apart from any mutations), but Dolly’s cloned material was her nuclear DNA – the DNA that normally comes half from each parent. The other, less frequently mentioned DNA, mitochondrial DNA came not from the sheep she was cloned from but from the donor of the egg. This DNA, which has proved valuable in the past for tracing the maternal line as it normally comes only from the mother, may not have much to do with the development of the embryo (and hence Dolly was to all intents and purposes a clone), but it does mean there is a distinction here.

With the science firmly established in some very readable text, Agar goes on to the ethics and the potential applications of cloning. Here, sometimes his line is a little less clear. While he picks up the point that the extreme supporters of abortion are also happy to kill newborn babies for convenience, because at this stage they are not yet people, and so argues that it’s possible to justify letting a cloned human be produced as most problems can be solved by destruction on detection, he doesn’t really follow through the reverse argument that most people are horrified with the concept of killing newborn babies for convenience, and so are unlikely to accept arguments derived from this premise.

What Agar makes clear is why cloning is difficult – a lot can go wrong in trying to switch back on all the genes that have been deactivated in an adult human. He also successfully destroys the idea of cloning as a means of living forever, makes therapeutic cloning seem eminently reasonable, and makes it clear that cloning as means of supplying babies for the infertile isn’t wrong in principle (though the current state of the technology makes it anything but desirable).

All in all a valuable addition to informed debate.

Paperback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Martin O'Brien

Comments

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

Should we question science?

I was surprised recently by something Simon Singh put on X about Sabine Hossenfelder. I have huge admiration for Simon, but I also have a lot of respect for Sabine. She has written two excellent books and has been helpful to me with a number of physics queries - she also had a really interesting blog, and has now become particularly successful with her science videos. This is where I'm afraid she lost me as audience, as I find video a very unsatisfactory medium to take in information - but I know it has mass appeal. This meant I was concerned by Simon's tweet (or whatever we are supposed to call posts on X) saying 'The Problem With Sabine Hossenfelder: if you are a fan of SH... then this is worth watching.' He was referencing a video from 'Professor Dave Explains' - I'm not familiar with Professor Dave (aka Dave Farina, who apparently isn't a professor, which is perhaps a bit unfortunate for someone calling out fakes), but his videos are popular and he...

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on...

Search This Blog