President and then chancellor of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, Lewis Thomas was a renowned physician, researcher, and educator. He was also one of the outstanding essayists of his time.

In 1971, Thomas began writing a monthly column--"Notes of a Biology Watcher"--for the New England Journal of Medicine. Praised for his wit and the graceful style of his prose, Lewis collected the columns in a series of popular and award-winning books. The paragraphs that follow have been drawn from the essay "On Cloning a Human Being" in the second of those books, The Medusa and the Snail (1979). In the essay he considers why human cloning is "the most dismaying of prospects."

Lewis's seemingly casual, almost spontaneous way of writing fits the definition of the running style: a sentence style that appears to follow the mind as it worries a problem through, mimicking the "rambling, associative syntax of conversation." But clearly it takes a master craftsman to convey the impression of such conversational ease--a strategy called sprezzatura.

from "On Cloning a Human Being"

by Lewis Thomas (1913-1993)

So to start with, you will undoubtedly need to clone the parents. No question about this. This means the diplomat is out, even in theory, since you couldn't have gotten cells from both his parents at the time when he was himself just recognizable as an early social treasure. You'd have to limit the list of clones to people already certified as sufficiently valuable for the effort, with both parents still alive. The parents would need cloning, and, for consistency, their parents as well. I suppose you'd also need the usual informed-consent forms, filled out and signed, not easy to get if I know parents, even harder for grandparents.

But this is only the beginning. It is the whole family that really influences the way a person turns out, not just the parents, according to psychiatric thinking. Clone the family.

Then what? The way each member of the family develops has already been determined by the environment set around him, and this environment is more people, people outside the family, schoolmates, acquaintances, lovers, enemies, car-pool partners, even, in special circumstances, peculiar strangers across the aisle on the subway. Find them, and clone them.

But there is no end to the protocol. Each of the outer contacts has his own surrounding family, and his and their outer contacts. Clone them all.

"On Cloning a Human Being," which first appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, was published in The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher, by Lewis Thomas (Viking Press, 1979).

Selected Works by Lewis Thomas:

• The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, (Viking, 1974)
• The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (Viking, 1979)
• The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher (Viking, 1983)
• Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony (Viking, 1983)
• .
• Et Cetera Et Cetera: Notes of a Word Watcher (Little, Brown, 1990)
• The Fragile Species (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992)