Reproducibility of Man
When Walter Benjamin wrote The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction in 1969, I am sure he didn’t expect it to parallel the arguments
of today’s discussions on the ethics of cloning. In the short shadow of the
replication of Dolly the sheep, and five little piglets from Virginia comes the discussion on if this
practice should really be allowed, and if so, what limits do you set? How can
you look in the eyes of people who have had there family members pass away
because the cloning of pigs for their organs have been outlawed. But what do
you say when it comes to the question of just raising humans, lets say in a
“human farm”, for exact organ and tissue matches. Where do you draw the line on
the recreation of things from our past? After finding the perfectly preserved
wooly mammoth in the arctic a few years in the past, researchers from several
nations have been actively collecting tissue from the remains of the wooly
mammoth in preparation for an attempt to bring the beast back from ten thousand
years of extinction (Salsberg 1).
