The bizarrely coifed and costumed spokeswoman for an equally bizarre cult announced the birth of the world’s first cloned human, a baby girl symbolically named Eve. The announcement was made without scientific confirmation of the genetic identity between the baby and her mother, but we are promised that the results of rigorous DNA testing will be available in a week or two. Whether true or not the announcement will touch off a renewed debate among ethicists and theologians. And, unfortunately, the politicians will weigh in seeking to be seen as doing something about the evil of human cloning. It will become a partisan issue separating the country along yet another sharp divide and we will enter yet another maze of unintended consequences.

The simplistic political response will be to make cloning human tissue a criminal offense. Ban it and it will go away. That easy answer is not so easy. How will unlawful cloning be punished. What sentencing range will be authorized? What agency will be charged with the job of being the Clone Police? Will mere possession of cloned human tissue be an offense? What laboratory work will be subject to strict regulation? Will the labs already at work cloning livestock and laboratory animals be subject to inspection to insure that some renegade scientist is using this dual use technology to work on human tissue in the dark hours of the night? How will we be sure that in-vitro fertilization labs are not surreptitiously implanting cloned embryos? Will we require that every mother and child be subjected to a DNA examination so that we are sure that the baby is not a clone? The questions are almost endless but the fact is the lamp of knowledge has already been rubbed and the genie is here.

The political debate will be acrid. The political posturing will be in simplistic terms. The thunder from the right will be in bombastic, theocratic slogans equating scientific inquiry with eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. It will be an exposition of intellectual clones railing against the dawn while hoping for the cover of continued night.

Already the Department of Health and Human Services is editing its public information to omitted studies that reach conclusions that do not support ideological positions held by the administration’s most strident supporters. Only ideologically pure information is worthy of dissemination. Is science to be tested not by rigorous peer review but by a new Fundamentalist Inquisition?

It appears that the ideological clones are warming up in the wings. Cue the lights.

Send in the Clones.