All about Eve146;s feelings

A scientist on Robert Oppenheimer8217;s Los Alamos team and a survivor from Hiroshima tiptoe around each other, and finally muster up the c...

A scientist on Robert Oppenheimer8217;s Los Alamos team and a survivor from Hiroshima tiptoe around each other, and finally muster up the courage to discuss the Bomb, in Dennis Bock8217;s fictional encounter The Ash Garden Bloomsbury. Dr Anton Boll, now deep into his seventies, has zealously hit the seminar circuit to dutifully defend his colleagues from those extraordinary days in 1945, to remind revisionists about 8220;necessary evil and historical context8221;. Emiko Amai, now in her fifties, makes films to resolve the dissonance between memory and history. 8220;Do you think that any of you on the Manhattan Project had concerns? For how it might be used, I mean,8221; she asks.

Without letting slip any of the twists in this stunning new novel, it is safe to say that the rehabilitation of physicists who worked on the nuclear bomb is proceeding apace. Literature and theatre have done their bit. Michael Frayn8217;s play Copenhagen left viewers mulling over what-ifs, by giving another lease of life to theories about Werner Heisenberg8217;s supposed attempts to hush research. But its very success provoked Neils Bohr8217;s estate to declassify letters showing that Heisenberg was in fact endeavouring to give Hitler the bomb, forget the glitches in the science he was employing. That the 8220;historical context8221; pointed to a clear and present danger.

And amidst a long enchantment with mad mathematicians 8212; in the Oscar-sweeping A Beautiful Mind and the Broadway smash Proof 8212; dead eccentric physicists too are being allowed sober reflection half a century after the collaboration in the New Mexico desert. In QED, Richard Feynman, played with endearing aplomb by Alan Alda, gets to substitute the gung-ho tenor of those times with meditations on the dangers gifted to humankind. Even the ignominies heaped on Oppenheimer during the McCarthy era are now being apologetically categorised.

Contrast them with the biotechnologists and embryologists now on trial. If one brood of scientists has been restored to its rightful pedestal, another is being vilified. Last week8217;s announcement by the Raelians, a loony cult which till now had been minding its own business while cooking up tall tales about rendezvous with aliens, saying they have delivered the first human clone, Eve, has reignited the outrage.

Science is once again hustling us toward uncharted realms, is the refrain. Bacterial genes in our salad, stem cell research to chisel designer babies, an attack of the clones on civilisation as we know it, is the hierarchy of worries. Gene scientists cannot be trusted to behave in their cavernous labs, is the common chorus of religious leaders and politicians. Laws against human cloning are being passed with understandable abandon; but a whole evolving field of study is also being tarred by the same brush with mindless zeal.

Thankfully the salvage operation is on. 8220;A knee-jerk reaction to Clonaid the Raelians8217; scientific wing, as it were claims could set back important medical research for years,8221; the American Association for the Advancement of Science has immediately warned. Science writers are stressing the critical differences between therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. The former, with its promised pot of cures for Parkinson8217;s, Alzheimer8217;s and much else at the end of the rainbow, it is iterated, in no way involves the creation of a human being.

Trouble is, as they8217;ll immediately concede, the technology involved is so similar that it could take just an ambitious embryologist and a petri-dish to cook up a human clone. The Raelians may be bluffing, but sooner rather than later someone8217;s going to give birth to a clone.

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And then, there will another group awaiting an image makeover. The clones. Rustle through commentaries of days and years past, check out the cloning scenarios offered. Osama bin Laden is cloned to keep the war against modernity going. Neo-Nazis clone Hitler to procure a rallying rabble rouser. Mafiamen draft an army of clones to undertake hit jobs.

Why is the nature vs nurture reality being overlooked? Why is clone a synonym for monster? As we nailbitingly await Dolly the Sheep8217;s first human counterpart, let8217;s make that imaginative leap to admit him or her into the circle of humanity. Clones will have feelings too, you know.