In His Image [Paperback]

But was it? The author, David Rorvik, has always maintained that the story he told was the truth. He included a great deal of technical descriptions of the techniques used to clone the mysterious "Max" as if he wanted future readers to know exactly how he claimed it was done. That can be compared to the techniques used today to clone mammals. Rorvik says in his Afterward to the book that he does not expect his story to be accepted, since he can offer no proof. He says he saw the baby, and it was a normal healthy baby. He was never shown the genetic proof that the baby was actually a clone, but he says that Max told him he had seen the verification that the baby was in fact his genetic duplicate.

I did an internet search on Rorvik and found many references to this book, and no consensus on whether it was fact or fiction. There are a number of references to it as fiction or a hoax, but in an interview with Omni magazine in 1997, Rorvik says the story is true and that he has continued to be contacted by people interested in cloning. However, he has nothing to say about Max, whether he has been in touch with him or seen the child, who would be a young man in his twenties now.

Why do people get so upset about human cloning? Why is it often described as "morally repugnant?" At the time of Rorvik's book, in vitro fertilization was still new and considered repugnant too. Rorvik describes how a friend of his, Dr. Landrum B. Shettles, was fired from his position at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital for creating a test-tube embryo for an infertile Florida woman. His superior destroyed the embryos and tried to discredit Dr. Shettles. That was the level of hysteria about a procedure now routinely done; there are probably thousands of people walking around who are the product of in vitro fertilization. They do not think of themselves as freaks because they are not.

Cloning is just one more way to make a baby, although it has little to recommend it. Isn't it better to use our new knowledge of our genetic make-up to eliminate defects and create better humans? It seems to me that the objections to cloning come down to a number of misunderstandings. People talk about cloning as a way to immortality, as if a clone of me is me. But that is not the case. The clone has the same genetic material, but is a separate person in the same way that identical twins are separate people. Someone who's been cloned, like Max, will die and his "immortality" is no more a reality than anyone who has children has a claim to immortality. We pass on our genes, but so what? We are each still responsible for our lives and how we live them. A clone would have his own life, his own soul, and be no less an individual than any of us. I find it interesting that in the experiments with multiple cloned cows, they were not even all physically the same. These were spotted cows and the spots had variations, attributed to the differences in the surrogate mothers and conditions of pregnancy. A clone, it turns out, is not necessarily an exact duplicate.

Human cloning will happen, if indeed it has not already happened. But it will not be popular, and the hysteria over it will eventually go away, as have the objections to in vitro fertilization. I would love to hear from anyone with more information about an existing human clone; see my longer review at my book review site, The Seeker Books.