New Delhi, Jan 04: A scientist on Robert Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos team and a survivor from Hiroshima tiptoe around each other, and finally muster up the courage to discuss the Bomb, in Dennis Bock’s fictional encounter The Ash Garden (Bloomsbury). Dr Anton Boll, now deep into his seventies, has zealously hit the seminar circuit to dutifully defend his colleagues from those extraordinary days in 1945, to remind revisionists about “necessary evil and historical context”. Emiko Amai, now in her fifties, makes films to resolve the dissonance between memory and history. “Do you think that any of you (on the Manhattan Project) had concerns? For how it might be used, I mean,” she asks.

Without letting slip any of the twists in this stunning new novel, it is safe to say that the rehabilitation of physicists who worked on the nuclear bomb is proceeding apace. Literature and theatre have done their bit. Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen left viewers mulling over what-ifs, by giving another lease of life to theories about Werner Heisenberg’s supposed attempts to hush research. But its very success provoked Neils Bohr’s estate to declassify letters showing that Heisenberg was in fact endeavouring to give Hitler the bomb, forget the glitches in the science he was employing. That the “historical context” pointed to a clear and present danger.
And amidst a long enchantment with mad mathematicians — in the Oscar-sweeping A Beautiful Mind and the Broadway smash Proof — dead eccentric physicists too are being allowed sober reflection half a century after the collaboration in the New Mexico desert. In QED, Richard Feynman, played with endearing aplomb by Alan Alda, gets to substitute the gung-ho tenor of those times with meditations on the dangers gifted to humankind. Even the ignominies heaped on Oppenheimer during the McCarthy era are now being apologetically categorised.
Contrast them with the biotechnologists and embryologists now on trial. If one brood of scientists has been restored to its rightful pedestal, another is being vilified. Last week’s announcement by the Raelians, a loony cult which till now had been minding its own business while cooking up tall tales about rendezvous with aliens, saying they have delivered the first human clone, Eve, has reignited the outrage.
Thankfully the salvage operation is on. “A knee-jerk reaction to Clonaid (the Raelians’ scientific wing, as it were) claims could set back important medical research for years,” the American Association for the Advancement of Science has immediately warned. Science writers are stressing the critical differences between therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. The former, with its promised pot of cures for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and much else at the end of the rainbow, it is iterated, in no way involves the creation of a human being.

Trouble is, as they’ll immediately concede, the technology involved is so similar that it could take just an ambitious embryologist and a petri-dish to cook up a human clone. The Raelians may be bluffing, but sooner rather than later someone’s going to give birth to a clone.
And then, there will another group awaiting an image makeover. The clones. Rustle through commentaries of days and years past, check out the cloning scenarios offered. Osama bin Laden is cloned to keep the war against modernity going. Neo-Nazis clone Hitler to procure a rallying rabble rouser. Mafiamen draft an army of clones to undertake hit jobs.
Why is the nature vs nurture reality being overlooked? Why is clone a synonym for monster? As we nailbitingly await Dolly the Sheep’s first human counterpart, let’s make that imaginative leap to admit him or her into the circle of humanity. Clones will have feelings too, you know.