Clone Your Troubles Away

One morning early last winter a small item appeared in my local newspaper announcing the birth of an extraordinary animal. A team of researchers at Texas A&M University had succeeded in cloning a whitetail deer. Never before done. The fawn, known as Dewey, was developing normally and seemed to be healthy. He had no mother, just a surrogate who had carried his fetus to term. He had no father, just a "donor" of all his chromosomes. He was the genetic duplicate of a certain trophy buck out of south Texas whose skin cells had been cultured in a laboratory. One of those cells furnished a nucleus that, transplanted and rejiggered, became the DNA core of an egg cell, which became an embryo, which in time became Dewey. So he was wildlife, in a sense, and in another sense elaborately synthetic. This is the sort of news, quirky but epochal, that can cause a person with a mouthful of toast to pause and marvel. What a dumb idea, I marveled.

North America contains about 20 million deer. The estimate is a...