Say it isn’t so. I’m not ready for this. The December 23rd New York Times reports that a woman paid $50,000 to have her beloved cat cloned by a company called, oh my, Genetic Savings and Clone. I can only hope that The Onion has deviously planted one of its articles in the Times and a statement will appear in the corrections column on December 24th apologizing for the breach of security. Except that it’s now January 5th.

Not that I wouldn’t like clone a few people.

I live in Los Angeles. If I want to listen to sports radio in the morning, I listen to James Brown or Jim Rome. James Brown is the nicest guy in the world. He’s humble, he usually limits himself to sports related subjects and looks at them fairly when he does. It would be nice, though, if he was willing to own an inflammatory opinion now and then. Jim Rome has never found a subject he couldn’t rap about endlessly and has never expressed the slightest doubt about any of his opinions. “Don’t tell me…” is one of his favorite phrases. If we could somehow mix their cells together, we would then have a very entertaining sports rapper who is opinionated, spends more time talking about sports than he does Martha Stewart’s stretch in jail and is neither too self effacing nor too full of himself. How cool would that be? You might miss the news items about the woman who shot herself when she forgot that she’d left her gun in the oven or the latest death from belly flopping but you’d adjust and be a better person for it.

However, it’s not that simple.

Let’s say something happened to Pedro Martinez tomorrow. His bereaved mother thinks to herself, “We are devastated by the loss of Pedro. We have plenty of money. Let’s see if we can get him cloned.” If you want to clone someone and you want them to be the same person you knew and loved, in this case a quirky but nonetheless very effective baseball pitcher, you would need to duplicate his environment as closely as possible. Starting with the womb. Our genes don’t determine all our characteristics thank heavens. Many of our characteristics are determined by the womb we hang out in for nine months. Pedro’s mother is probably not a good candidate for pregnancy at this point though I did read another article I hoped wasn’t true. A 67 year old woman is seven months pregnant with twins in Romania. By the time I read this I was totally speechless, not a common occurrence.

What would it be like to give birth to the same child twice? How would inbreeding work I wonder? Usually a child has the DNA of its mother and father. A clone only has the DNA of its mother or father. Inbreeding causes problems because it minimizes the genetic diversity between the mother and father. Offspring of inbreeding are more susceptible to diseases and health problems that run in the family. What if you cloned yourself and carried yourself to term? When I meet someone who has the same annoying habits I have, I can’t stand to be in the same room with them. I would not want to give birth to and raise me.

Back to Pedro. It would be important to be raised in the Dominican Republic because everybody is crazy about baseball. It would help if you were a barefoot boy from a poor family desperate to play baseball and make it to the big leagues so you could buy big houses for your family and friends and bring great pride to your country. Except that Pedro would be the favorite son raised in the lap of luxury this time around. He’d probably sit on the couch all day eating potato chips and watching baseball on satellite television. Who wants to run around barefoot in the hot sun throwing sockballs at a cement wall when you could be playing video games on a huge flat screen TV?

Speaking of twins, identical twins are clones. That means that Jose Canseco and his brother Ozzie are clones. Maybe even more alike than clones because they were raised in the same womb at the same time. So this is what might happen if you clone someone. You might get an o.k. baseball player who barely makes it to the bigs. Or you might get a blustery bruiser who uses steroids to become a home run slugger for the Oakland A’s. Along the way he might get arrested for domestic abuse, convicted of felony aggravated battery and test positive for steroids while on probation.

Isn’t there something unique about each person in the world? Isn’t this what we mean when we talk about spirit? Isn’t that entirely beyond the realm of cloning? Even if I hadn’t spent the past thirty years going to Opening the Heart workshops and Conscious Living/Conscious Dying workshops and every other spiritual workshop every offered, this would still be a subject of deep interest to me. I was raised in an adoptive family. Every adopted person I know is obsessed with identity. We want to know how much we were formed by our adoptive family and how much we share with our birth family. As we get older, though, this becomes less important. We have to make difficult life decisions and find a peaceful way of living with our thoroughly exasperating personalities. We can’t blame our family for everything and even if we had the worst family in the world, there’s nothing we can do about it now.

Another Victor Conte will come along to develop a new steroid that can’t be detected in current drug tests. Athletes will still be under great pressure to use them. Salaries will continue to go up. Kids will leave school earlier and earlier to turn pro. Pissed off fans will still throw cups onto the court because they are tired of paying too much for tickets to see very rich basketball players complain about not being able to feed their family. Science doesn’t contribute much to a solution. Steroids just make things worse and I can’t imagine how cloning could help.

Last week in class, my yoga teacher said that people tend to dream less when their life is less stressful. If you shoot up steroids, worry about your current batting slump and think about that younger player threatening to take away your job, when you go to sleep, if you can sleep, you might dream that the bat disintegrates in your hands as you swing or you might dream that the younger player accidentally disappears into a huge pit and is devoured by hungry lions, anything to help you deal with the stress. If, however, you come to the end of the day and you’ve done your best to address all of the issues in your life and generally feel like you’ve chosen appropriate goals, you’ll go to bed knowing that you’ve done what you can and enjoy a deep satisfying sleep. Isn’t this the idea in life? The goal here is not to bring back your pet cat. The goal is to lead a productive life and learn how to manage stress.