The Person
Page 2
think I cannot hear, but I can read everything they are saying in the way they shake their heads, frown, glance nervously in my direction. They say I am a sell-out – that is, when they are using restraint.
And I am. Unashamedly. My wife is dead. My son is dead. Who else do I have to work for but myself? The suffering innocents? I could not do it. If my research saved just one person, I would want to kill them. Why should they live when my son has died?
So what do I do? Nothing? Lie in bed and wait as the waves of loneliness slowly pull me out into the darkness? I must do something. And if I am going to do something, why not do it for myself? Why choose to live in poverty when I, unlike much of the world, have the option not to?
I am a sell-out. If David were still alive, I would be ashamed. But he is not, so I feel nothing.”[1]
22: Whilst his son was alive, Mr Baker had been toying with some ways of improving and streamlining the animal cloning techniques being developed at the time, but he had never had the time nor the inclination to take them beyond mere postulation. Now he put them into practice with, as has been demonstrated in hindsight, spectacular scientific and business success.
23: If his journal is to be believed, at the time he commenced at Masha Cloning, Mr Baker had no thoughts whatsoever of extending the practice to humans – let alone to his own son. True it is that he did not dispose of the multitude of samples he had collected over the years – to the contrary, he removed them from the institute who owned them (but who had full knowledge that he was removing them) and retained them at his house – and later at the Masha Cloning laboratories.
24: His reasoning was simple, and I accept it:
“I have kept some possessions – clothing, toys, favourite books – but none meant a shadow of what his blood meant to me. This was his DNA. His life. His soul. Kevin [his brother-in-law] said I should dispose of it. I told him I would dispose of it when he had thrown away his mother’s ashes and burned his father’s corpse. Kevin has not spoken to me since.”[2]
The birth of the Deceased
25: The first publicly known human clone was created, as most of us now know, on 23 July 2012. Creating a flurry of excitement, fear, hope, hate and, ultimately, legislation by her very existence, Caroline Chang thrust mankind into a new era, where only one parent was required for human reproduction. There have been 14 known clones since then. The government tells us that the low number is the result of the strict legislation that was introduced almost immediately and universally throughout the world once the birth of Ms Chang was reported. Others will say that the legislation did no more than force cloned humans underground. In any case, such matters are not relevant to this action.
26: What is relevant is that, as we now know, Caroline Chang was in fact preceded by another clone – extraordinarily, by more than 17 years. It is beyond doubt on the evidence – and not disputed – that David Patrick Baker was born a perfect clone (an almost perfect clone, as I will explain below) of his deceased younger ‘brother’, David Patrick Baker, on 4 April 2003.
27: As to exactly how Mr Baker accomplished this so far ahead of his time, there is some debate. Without doubt, he was a brilliant scientist who was years ahead of most of his rivals. Also without doubt, he was obsessive and single-minded, caring not about ethics, law nor the destruction of an extraordinary number of human foetuses, illegally obtained. It has been argued by some that he was exceptionally lucky – that if he had tried to do the same again with the exact same techniques, he would not have achieved it again within his lifetime.
28: Again though, the ‘how’ is not strictly relevant to this action. It was done, and David Baker came into being. That is what matters and it is not in dispute.
29: Mr Baker did not, however, simply clone his son. As he writes on 8 March 2000:
“I can do it. I can bring him back, I’m sure of it. David would be back with me, just like before. And just like before, my poisoned genes would take him from me. Would he last longer this time, knowing what we know and with the advances in medicine since? Perhaps. Would it be any less painful to lose him? Of course not.”[3]
30: As to whether it would have been cruel to create the cloned child, knowing his fate, is a different issue. Is a doomed life better than no life at all?
31: Thankfully, it is a question I do not need to answer, because the boy who was born to an unknown surrogate was, at least on the surface, identical in every way to Mr Baker’s son but without Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. In that respect he was not a ‘perfect’ clone, but rather an improved one.
32: I do not intend to go deeply into the science of how exactly Mr Baker achieved this. The transcript of the expert evidence will be made public as well as the exhibits tendered in support. It is my duty as a judicial officer to understand the science, and I consider that I do understand it. I do not however profess to be capable of summarising six days of expert evidence and 2,300 pages of scientific documentation into anything which may be considered digestible by an ordinary reader.
33: Mr Baker’s journal is no help in this respect either. It was a journal written for his own purposes, and thus makes no attempt to cater for the uninformed.
34: It suffices to say that Mr Baker needed to remove the particular part of his son’s genetic code which contained the ‘blueprint’ for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. This in itself involved scientific breakthroughs which have since revolutionised medicine. Mr Baker’s primary difficulty, however, was replacing the code.
35: Much of his research, which involved thousands of failed experiments, revolved around trying to replace the defective code with healthy code from another human. This was in fact accomplished approximately a decade later by an American team, but Mr Baker was unable to achieve this feat.
36: So Mr Baker abandoned this avenue and focused instead on the much simpler genetic code of non-human animals. It has long been known that the genetic makeup of humans is remarkably similar to that of animals – humans and chimpanzees share 97% of genetic material, but perhaps more surprisingly, humans share 75% of their genetic material with the nematode worm.
37: The premise was that the particular section of David’s DNA that needed to be replaced could be replaced by healthy, non-human DNA.
38: Again, to state it so simply is to grossly simplify many years of intensely focussed and ground-breaking scientific research. I may just as well describe the invention of space travel as “making planes go up”. Yet for the purposes of this judgment, that is enough. He took out the damaged portion of his dead son’s genetic code and replaced it with a healthy portion of non-human DNA.
39: Mr Baker describes the moment of success thus:
“David is coming back to me – not the David who died in my arms, but the new, improved, healthy David. The David who will be able to run in the park with me, play football with me, do all the things he was denied in his first lifetime. He will grow up with me. He will feel the pain of loss when I die, but it will be tempered by the knowledge that I lived a full life, a long life. He will go on, and create new life himself just as he was meant to do.
It was mus spicilegus [Steppe mouse] in the end – my son the mound-builder! My own little chimera – destined to spring from the womb with tail, fluffy ears and a penchant for cheese! I will have to begin work on a running wheel of sufficient size.”[4]
40: Self-evidently, Mr Baker held no genuine concerns as to the inclusion of rodent genetic material – whether this was based on scientific fact or desperate optimism is unclear. What mattered to him was that a child with the same genetic material as his son, save for that part which contained Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, was to be born.
41: And born he was on 4 April 2003, just over six years since the passing of his predecessor. Not unexpectedly, Mr Baker named him David. From here on in, I will refer to the original child as “Mr Baker’s son”, and the cloned child as “David” or “the Deceased”.
42: Mr Baker immediately changed his role at Masha Cloning. He worked almost exclusi
vely from home so that he could care for his son (who had arrived to the utter surprise of his colleagues). His work remained brilliant, but it was done from a distance. He was a recluse – and considered a somewhat eccentric one – but as long as his work did not suffer and Masha Cloning edged closer to their goal, no-one cared how, where or why he continued to work as long as he did.
David’s early years
43: He did not have a tail, fluffy ears nor an unnatural taste for cheese. He did not exercise in a running wheel, nor spend his days attempting to escape increasingly complex mazes. To the contrary, he appeared by all accounts to be a healthy young boy.
44: Records of young David are taken primarily from Mr Baker’s journal. Although he did not keep the boy in seclusion, he kept a low profile. He was a man of few friends to begin with and no family, but his isolation increased by necessity. People were aware he had a new child whom he said he had adopted. Anyone who might recognise the child as the original David were kept strictly at a distance.
45: By all accounts he was a good and loving father, and his joy at raising young David only improved when, by the age of ten, he was finally confident that the condition which had struck down his original son was, as he had engineered it, missing from this child.
46: This was