Books: How to Clone the Perfect Blonde

Cloning around

By John Ziebell

"Could science really make your shallowest dreams come true?" This is the big question asked by the authors of How to Clone the Perfect Blonde, both responsible adult correspondents for the BBC. The title sounds glib, but the answers are entertaining and sophisticated, a brief collection of mini-treatises on why perceived solutions to desires like building a perfect partner, turning back time, upgrading your body or living forever might be more the stuff of nightmares than fantasy.

How to Clone the Perfect Blonde is billed as a layman's explanation of cutting-edge scientific practice for people who "couldn't get past Chapter 2 of A Brief History of Time"--pretty much everybody I know. The book's success stems in part from humor, a clarity of language and the authors' ability to neatly condense fairly heady theoretical background information, but it also offers graceful illustrations of the interrelationships between complex ideas, using examples that range from Homer Simpson to Alan Turing and "Star Trek" to string theory, taking time out along the way to explain why, if we needed proof, 12 Monkeys is a better movie than Groundhog Day--in terms of how they deal with physics, at least. And this is fun stuff. Who really knew, offhand, why Einstein needed both a general and special theory of relativity?

Eight chapters deal with such cultural staples as cloning, artificial intelligence, time travel, black holes, teleportation, cryonics and body modification--and they don't mean piercing. Some of these ideas have probably crossed most of our minds in the course of one fantasy or another: Who would you clone as your perfect partner...and what would you do if the clone had the personality of a werewolf? Exactly what services would your robot provide? Why wouldn't you teleport to work--and how might you be reassembled on the other end if you did?

The sections begin with comic or at least conversational approaches to their topics. "How to Lose your Love Handles" begins by discussing the false allure of obesity remedies and moves into an explanation of the human genome, which introduces a discourse on gene therapy, addressing concerns that are not only physical--genetic alteration can cure, but also kill--but philosophical: "Eugenics isn't dead," the text notes, "It's just become more complicated." Witness the growth industry of genetically modified foods, brought to us by Monsanto, the folks who introduced caffeine to Coca Cola and Agent Orange to Vietnam. The discussion of time travel begins with the "If Only" game--as in, "If only I could go back and..."--to launch its exploration of parallel universes, relativity and that eternally sticky genre-fiction problem of messing with the past.

Quite often, the book points out, our misconceptions cut both ways. If your grandmother has had a hip replaced or a cochlear implant to improve bad hearing, she's undergone the ultimate in elective surgery--she's a cyborg. Sure, somewhere in chiaroscuro-lit laboratories white-coated geeks are hard-wiring lampreys or transplanting monkey brains, but most of this research is compensatory--artificial limbs, the book notes, are becoming more and more like the real ones every day: "At the moment, rather than being better, stronger and faster, any bionic man would be worse, weaker and slower."

Some bits are creepier than others. The science behind cryonics is sound, and embryos can be frozen successfully for later use...but what about Michael Jackson? The Acor Life Extension Foundation reportedly has some 50 individuals flash-frozen at its facility in Arizona, even though we have no idea whether either the human the consciousness or the human form could survive defrosting. "Of course," the authors add with typical Brit tongue in cheek, "future generations might have better things to do than bring back the dead." Which segues into one of the neat little sidebars that helps make this work unique, this one on the Frozen Dead Guy Festival in Nederland, Colo.--well, you'll have to get the book to check that out for yourself.