The Clone Age

Yesterday's science fiction is today's litigation, and nobody knows that better than Lori B. Andrews, an attorney specializing in genetic and reproductive technology. Her book The Clone Age is a personal look at the sweeping changes that have affected the way we think of making babies: in vitro fertilization (IVF), surrogate motherhood, and, of course, the very real prospect of human cloning. Andrews has advised physicians, legislatures, and various governments on the legal and ethical aspects of these technologies, defending the rights of prospective parents and donors and blazing trails through territory that was literally inaccessible just a few years ago. Imagine Solomon confronted with the dilemma of a child born to a surrogate mother from donated egg and sperm at the request of an infertile couple: Would she have five parents, two, or none? Andrews has confronted this and many other puzzlers, and her report from the front is both entertaining and thought-provoking.

While she has spent much of her career arguing for the use of IVF and other technology to further reproductive choices, she does favor regulation to curb the field's dark side, such as the thinly veiled racism of nouveau eugenicists who want to "boost" the gene pool with (mostly American and European) Nobel Prize-winners' sperm. She herself has drawn the line at human cloning, which she feels serves no useful purpose and is too easily abused to be allowed as a reproductive strategy. Whether this view will prevail, as so many of her others have, will be decided in time, as today's litigation becomes tomorrow's policy. --Rob Lightner Lori Andrews passed her bar exam the day the first test-tube baby was born. Since that time she has become the world's most visible expert on the legal and ethical implications of reproductive technology, sought after to assess the rights of cryonically susped severed heads, the legal entanglements of surrogate motherhood, and the ethics of creating babies from dead men's sperm. She has been an advisor on genetic and reproductive technology to the president and Congress, the World Health Organization, the FBI, and such oddly interested parties as the emirate of Dubai. In this provocative memoir, she relates her experiences, unmasking the bizarre motives and methods of a new breed of scientist, bringing to life the wrenching issues we all face as venture capital floods medical research, technology races ahead of legal and ethical ground rules, and ordinary people struggle to maintain both human dignity and their own emotional balance.