by James Q. Wilson

About the author: James Q. Wilson is Collins professor of management and public policy at the University of California Los Angeles and the author of several books, including The Moral Sense and On Character: Essays.

Let us suppose that it becomes possible to clone human beings. The creation of Dolly the cloned sheep makes this more likely than anyone once suspected. How should we react to this event"

Like most people, I instinctively recoil from the idea. There is, I think, a natural sentiment that is offended by the mental picture of identical babies being produced in some biological factory. When we hear a beautiful model say that she would like to have a clone of herself, we are puzzled. When we recall The Boys from Brazil, a story of identical offspring of...