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On cloning

The second most important topic in my working novel.

If I could clone Jonah or Henry, would I do so? I believe a great portion of their qualities to be due to my influence. My bird will live perhaps till I am forty. My cat, possibly. That considered, I could live through another bird, and two more cats. If I raised another bird or cat, they might or might not be similar, because my raising them is combined, of course, with natural predispositions, but if that animal had the same genome as my previous one, combined with my specific manner of care, I believe it would turn out to be exactly the same.

Therefore, the cloned bird or cat would love me exactly the same. It would be the same animal and same relationship between us, wouldn't it? I would not be preserving the original animal from old age and death, of course, but I would in a sense be preserving a relationship by reanimating it. The question is, would that be wrong?

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