The Boys From Brazil

Ira Levin's 1976 novel The Boys From Brazil posits the rebirth of world-historical fascism by way of cloning: The infamous Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele, having escaped war-crimes tribunals, lovingly preserved and replicated a few of Adolf Hitler's cells and, working from his laboratory deep in the Paraguayan rainforest, implanted these cells with expert cloning technology in some 40 young women who, before being murdered, gave birth to identical-looking boys who were adopted out to suitably vetted families and whose progress through life was managed and exploited by Mengele and his minions, with a view toward nurturing a literally reconstituted Fuhrer and Fourth Reich. The potential destructiveness of cloning was carried forward into the Jurassic Park series of movies, which posit that dinosaur DNA, spurred to life by mad scientists, could spell the end of mankind.

Plainly, this is the stuff of melodramatic suspense thrillers, but aspects of Levin's plot and the Jurassic series achieved plausibility in part because they had both literary and scientific antecedents. Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, first published in 1932, posits the cloning--Huxley's term is budding (Huxley 35ff)--of an elite, or "civilized," strand of Homo sapiens generated in laboratories designed for the purpose, distinguished from the "savages" who come into being the old-fashioned way. By 1943, Nazi concentration-camp culture had evolved to the point of serving as "a protected place for acts of violence

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that all: if the donor of the nucleus were the victim of a mutational disease like Huntington's Disease, the genomic lesion first could be repaired by genetic engineering of donated cells . . . and then the genetically repaired nucleus could be transferred into the egg cytoplasm (Pollack 101). Repaired stem cells, reimplanted into the patient, would function as "a tissue replacement treatment designed solely for the one person who donates the nucleus" (Pollack 102). The stem cells would presumably carry no risk of graft rejection because they would contain the patient's genetic code, not the genetic code of the egg donor. However, the wall of the enucleated egg would contribute mitochondrial DNA and RNA to the embryo (Johnson 30; McGee 271). Controversy surrounds both reproductive and therapeutic cloning. All cloning technology anticipates discarding or destroying eggs that do not make it through the process of nidation and gestation. For those who believe that human life begins at fertilization, the destruction of fertilized eggs basically disposes of the issue, and the same arguments as are used against the practice of IVF would come into play. A statement by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops illustrates the ethical concer

Category: Literature - T