I thought of the women I met in Japan who shave their faces every day with tiny little pink razors, to ensure smoothness and grip for their foundation. Jennifer has shaved once or twice but she felt even more self-conscious, as if people were thinking she was trying to hide her imperfections and not really doing a very good job of it. This way at least, Jennifer is indubitably herself, just the way God planned her, and profoundly independent and dignified with it, though you’ll also be pleased to know she has a sense of humour about the situation. I liked her take on life and felt lucky that, in my fifties , I could learn from the way she has chosen to express herself as a feminist. There is no male counterpart for such insights.
To Me, America is a sequence of these odd and interesting encounters. That is just one reason why I love the place so much and talk about it so often. I don’t think I ever got over the thrill of finding out in my teens that my real father was Italian-American, and when I went to Ellis Island, it was an extraordinary experience seeing my family name on the wall I like the tactility of Americans They don’t know how to be cynical or how to wordplay.

In fact, they’re confounded by their terror of language in a way we could never be. Yet they’re so able and easy when discussing themselves and their psyches. Americans talk about the geography of their minds the way Canadians talk about their land, and those interior landscapes make for a huge mass of uncharted territory. Perhaps that is the sense of limitless opportunity on which the American dream thrives. Unfortunately, the downside is an expectation of instant gratification and a whole lot of waste It drives me nuts. Huge undrunk glasses of ice water, great plates of half-eaten food, a need for fresh flesh for entertainment, a chronic inability to wait in queues or hear someone out.

If reflection does breed anxiety, as I’m beginning to think, it makes sense that America is running as hard from itself as it can.. The cloning of an adult mammal has been foreseeable for a decade but has apparently taken Britain and the United States by surprise. This, not the estimable Dolly the lamb, is what is so shocking. Technology is the most potent agent of change in any society – economies and ideologies adapt to technologies, not the other way around – and most innovation is eminently predictable Yet we always seem to be startled by it. Thus, David Alton, MP, asks for research to be suspended pending ethical assessment, while President Clinton orders a “full inquiry”.

What are these assessments and inquiries supposed to do? Pronounce that we’re not ready for this advance and ask it to come back in a few decades’ time? Better, maybe, to set up a committee that asks why we approach the 21st century so ill- equipped to handle the rapid pace of technological change. Even politicians who are content to remain scientifically illiterate would be well-advised to learn one important scientific distinction: some things are impossible while others are merely difficult It is important to know the difference. The suggestion in a national newspaper in 1993 by one of Britain’s best-known embryologists that human cloning is “almost as unlikely as building a time machine” shows that not everybody has. Time machines are impossible because they would break what the late Sir Peter Medawar called “the bedrock laws of physics”, which are simply not for bending. The cloning of humans breaks no such laws and was always possible in principle – and might be achieved within a few years or even months from now. In decades it could be routine, providing new insights on how genes are turned on and off, and from thence to knowledge of how to prolong life indefinitely. Resurrection of dinosaurs, as in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, is similarly theoretically possible if dinosaur DNA survived intact, but it apparently does not.

Mammoths, though, might well be reconstructed one day from frozen flesh None of this should take us by surprise. We should already be pondering societies in which nobody has to die. Our children and grandchildren may live in one.
With that in mind, an ad hoc ethical committee seems a woefully inadequate response. As we have seen too often, the ethical pronouncements of such bodies, delivered with the gravity of eternal truth, stand only until the might of commerce or the next childless couple click the ratchet of acceptability to the next notch.