Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Get in on the ground floor of the biggest money making opportunity of the next century! If you thought illicit drugs and alcohol were attractive profit centers, wait until the black-market cloning industry really gets rolling!

The US government recently announced it was making human cloning illegal - forcing one of the reproductive technologies I expect to become critically important in the future into the back alleys, basement laboratories, and offshore installations where proscribed sciences and services fester and mutate while awaiting the unlikely reawakening of rationality.

Does anyone really believe that a government ban on human cloning will stop those who really want to clone humans from doing so? Seems to me the government's actions will only restrict the rational development of the technology by mainstream science, in effect turning over the future of cloning to the mad scientists and greed driven technocrats who will offer their services to the least appropriate cloning subjects - exactly the result the "ban" is officially intended to block.

So all the traditional conditions are now in place for the rise of a new black-market industry - illicit cloning! For those unencumbered by an inconvenient sense of morals, now is the time to get into this great money making opportunity on the ground floor. I predict major financial rewards for those with the foresight and diminished scruples to set up the first offshore human cloning labs.

While the prohibition-enhanced cost of speakeasy and offshore cloning will prohibit its use by middle class infertile couples or to maintain the genetic diversity threatened by the reduced fertility rates of successful women, the cost will be little obstacle for those driven by their own inner demons to create copies of the monsters of the world. I predict that black-market cloning will build into a significant segment of the alternative economy - possibly providing a replacement for the increasingly difficult to justify illegal drug trade should rationality finally force that prohibition to be lifted. Once again the government prohibitionists will create exactly the problem they claim to be preventing.

The first stage of offshore and back alley speakeasy type cloning labs will be hugely profitable in the short term, but I see greater opportunities beyond the basic hands-on involvement. Just as the people who made the real money from the gold rush were the ones selling shovels, I expect the greatest opportunities in the black-market cloning industry to go to those producing do-it-yourself cloning kits. With a cloning kit (delivered to your door in a plain brown wrapper), assorted common household plumbing materials, and special process management software running on an off-the-shelf computer, anyone with access to plumbing and electricity will be able to clone themselves in the privacy of their own homes. Just assemble the machine, turn it on, and come back in 9 months!

Another angle on the business will be small neighborhood baby factories supplying the local demand of all those unable or unwilling to satisfy their needs through traditional means. Why go through all the hassle and delay of adopting a baby from Romania when you can buy a local product down on the corner. Why have your own children with all the risks of birth defects, still births, and maternal mortality, when you can buy a pain free proven product from (allegedly) celebrity stock? We won't go into the other darker but none the less high profit markets for helpless infants that driving black-market cloning outside of the constraints of mainstream society will allow the new industry to fill.

It just could be that Clinton's cloning ban will turn out to be the greatest stimulus the cloning industry could ever have. Without the prohibition, cloning would become the domain of the mainstream medical and scientific communities, with all of their red tape and restrictive criteria. Officially sanctioned cloning would have been very slow and cautious, constrained and manipulated by oversight bodies and review boards, always scrounging for sufficient funding.

The government prohibition is undoubtedly the best thing that could happen for the profit side of human cloning. The evolution of the technology won't be as smooth and orderly as it would have been if officially sanctioned, and there will undoubtedly be a lot more "unfortunate" unexpected results this way, but nothing has ever proven a better stimulus to morally questionable businesses than being officially banned. Look what the prohibitionists have already done for the drugs, sex, and gambling markets.

Seems to me the first thing to do is raise enough investment capital to buy an island or the government of a small poor country. Interested parties with large piles of cash to invest should send a letter of introduction to the editor of this newsletter...