Amazon.com
Yesterday's science fiction is today's litigation, and nobody knows that better than Lori B. Andrews, an attorney specializing in genetic and reproductive technology. Her book The Clone Age is a personal look at the sweeping changes that have affected the way we think of making babies: in vitro fertilization (IVF), surrogate motherhood, and, of course, the very real prospect of human cloning. Andrews has advised physicians, legislatures, and various governments on the legal and ethical aspects of these technologies, defending the rights of prospective parents and donors and blazing trails through territory that was literally inaccessible just a few years ago. Imagine Solomon confronted with the dilemma of a child born to a surrogate mother from donated egg and sperm at the request of an infertile couple: Would she have five parents, two, or none? Andrews has confronted this and many other puzzlers, and her report from the front is both entertaining and thought-provoking.
While she has spent much of her career arguing for the use of IVF and other technology to further reproductive choices, she does favor regulation to curb the field's dark side, such as the thinly veiled racism of nouveau eugenicists who want to "boost" the gene pool with (mostly American and European) Nobel Prize-winners' sperm. She herself has drawn the line at human cloning, which she feels serves no useful purpose and is too easily abused to be allowed as a reproductive strategy. Whether this view will prevail, as so many of her others have, will be decided in time, as today's litigation becomes tomorrow's policy. --Rob Lightner
From Publishers Weekly
In the brave new world of reproductive technology, legal and moral issues sprout as freely as bacteria in a petri dish. A professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law and director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Andrews uses first-person accounts of her own legal work and summaries of pertinent news events to explore the burgeoning realm of genetic manipulation. By providing concrete examples of the controversial issues, Andrews personalizes such seemingly remote possibilities as human cloning. In vitro fertilization, egg donation, frozen embryos, surrogate mothers, gender determination and other contemporary biological phenomena are examined with the knowing eye of an attorney on the lookout for legal conundrums: "If an unmarried woman used donor sperm, could she sue the donor for child support? Could the resulting child, like adoptees in some countries, learn the identity of her donor father?" As a consultant to courts, doctors and various government agencies, and as a mother (via the old-fashioned method of conception), Andrews takes the reader on an eye-opening tour of laboratories and legal issues. Her writing is lively, informed by references to literature and contemporary events, and her narrative is marked by droll, ironic commentaries. Weaving tales from Dubai to Canada and places in between, Andrews resembles a modern-day Gulliver, alternately astounded, bemused or saddened by each new boundary crossed by the latter-day sciences of reproduction. Agent, Amanda Urban at ICM.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
