When my 16-year-old daughter, Lily, casually asked me this question over breakfast, I nearly choked on my coffee. What followed was a journey into cutting-edge science, ethical dilemmas, and the terrifying question: How well do we really know our children?
The Bizarre Breakfast Revelation
It started as a normal Tuesday morning. I was scrambling eggs when Lily dropped her bombshell:
“So… I’ve been working on something at the bio lab. I cloned you. Wanna meet her?”
At first, I laughed, thinking it was one of her dark humor jokes. Then she pulled out her phone and showed me security footage of a woman who looked exactly like me—same mannerisms, same voice—sitting in what appeared to be a laboratory break room.
The Underground Science Project
As it turned out, my “science nerd” daughter had been participating in an underground biotechnology collective at her high school. Using discarded hair samples from my brush and equipment “borrowed” from the school lab, she’d created my genetic duplicate through somatic cell nuclear transfer—the same process used to clone Dolly the sheep.
“It’s not illegal if it’s for educational purposes,” Lily shrugged, as if she’d just shown me a pottery project rather than a living, breathing copy of her mother.
Meeting “Mom 2.0”
Against every instinct screaming “this is wrong,” I agreed to meet my clone. The lab (a repurposed storage room at the school) contained shockingly professional equipment. And there she was—my doppelgänger, wearing my favorite sweater I’d “lost” months ago.
The clone called herself “Eve” and had all my memories up until the point of her “creation.” She hugged me and whispered: “Don’t be mad at Lily. She just wanted to see if she could.”
The Ethical Nightmare Unfolds
Questions flooded my mind:
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Did Eve have legal rights?
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Was she aging normally?
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Could my daughter face criminal charges?
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Which one of us was the real me?
When I confronted Lily about the morality of creating life as a “science project,” she rolled her eyes. “Relax, Mom. We’ve cloned three teachers and the principal too. It’s basically just advanced tissue culture.”
The Impossible Decision
Now I’m left with an unimaginable choice:
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Report this to authorities and risk my daughter’s future
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Keep the secret and become complicit in illegal human cloning
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Try to “dispose” of Eve (which feels like murder)
As I write this, Eve is in our guest room, bonding with our cat. Lily is upstairs researching how to clone the cat. And I’m questioning everything I thought I knew about parenting, ethics, and what it means to be human.