Critical Thinking Blog Post #4

There have been many different opinions on the topic of human cloning and there have been expressed in many ways. One of the ways someone expressed their views about this topic is through a play. Caryl Churchill wrote a play called The Number about human cloning. This play shows the conflicts that can come along with human cloning. In the play a father, Salter, clones his son Bernard for many different reasons. But instead of just having one clone of Bernard there ends up being about 20 clones of him. In the play Salter stated "but i didn't know, that wasnt part of the deal. They were meant to make one of you not a whole number, they stole that, we'll deal with, it's something for lawyers. But you're what I wanted, you're the one" (Churchill 158). Salter bascially address his concern that there was not supposed to be more then 1 clone of Bernard but he is happy that he got what he wanted. The clone of Bernard has a big problem with the fact that he was cloned. Bernard #2 states "I'm just a copy. I'm not the real one" (Churchill 158). You can see here that B2 does not like the fact that he is just a copu of a son that Salter had but he wants to make it up to this clone by being a better father. This play shows the complexities of cloning in the sesnse that Salter only cloned his son Bernard because he wanted to make up for being a bad father to him when he was younger. Due to this, things did not go as they were planned and everything ends up tragically.
Two questions which this play addresses are, What is more important, nature or nurture? and also Is it alright to do cloning to satisfy someone's desire forsomething?
I think that Churchill does take sides on the topic of human cloning because it can be seen throughout the play that cloning Bernard has gone terribly wrong and not one thing went right with any part of the process. If she would have left it up to the reader to decide whether or not cloning was wrong or right then there would be some benefits of the Bernards cloning, which is not seen in the play.
Stories, or plays, like this can gives us different perspectives on the different topics such as human cloning. This is because authors that are humanisits can give us a more moral or ethical view on the subject. Churchill does this because she addresses the fact that cloning is a wrong thing to do as can be seen throughout the cloning of Bernard.