A clone writes
Sharing your DNA with someone does not make you the same person, says Lowri Turner By Lowri Turner, Friday January 10, 2003 The Guardian

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I am a clone. Even writing that feels odd. I might as well say I am a tomato, or a VW Beetle, or a leather three-piece suite with free footstool from DFS for all the resonance the word "clone" has for me. I don't feel like a clone. I don't think I look like a clone. And yet, strictly speaking, I am one. I am an identical twin. I am an exact genetic copy of someone else, or they are a copy of me, depending on your point of view. As the younger twin - my sister Catrin and I were born by

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Caesarean, so it was more of a queueing system and I was at the back - I tend to accept that it is I who am the copy and my sister who is the original. But then, when you've spent your childhood being given a dead arm for daring to corral Sindy's pony for exclusive personal use, you tend to acquiesce easily to sibling bullying. When you are part of a multiple birth - I have another non-identical triplet sister to confuse

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matters further - you are used to being a curiosity. As a child, people stared, teachers got confused and my identical sister and I were asked to be bridesmaids a lot. During the mid-70s, when big old-fashioned cinemas had a habit of converting to three smaller screens, my two sisters and I had a lucrative sideline touring north London posing on a three-wheeled bicycle for local papers. As an adult, twindom elicits more peculiar reactions. I have lost count of the number of

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men who have asked, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, whether we ever go out with the same bloke. The answer, by the way, is no. Then there are those who enquire if my sister and I are telepathic. Again, no. Still, up to now, I may have been a freak, but I was regarded as a benevolent one. Now, thanks to a mad doctor working for an even madder religious cult, the term clone has entered everyday

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use. Suddenly, being part of a matching set has taken on a much more threatening edge. My worry now is that I will be seen not so much as a genetic accident as part of some Bond-style plot to people the world with an identikit master race. Well, perhaps it's time for a clone to put the record straight. First, clones are not duplicates. Any self-obsessed millionaire who thinks he can knock up a "mini-me" in a test tube to ensure his own

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immortality is going to be disappointed. Twins may start out identical, but from the moment the original egg divides, the two halves are set on different paths in life. My mother insists that my

sister and I felt different from the first moment she held us. Certainly, my sister was bolshier. She kicked whoever sat beside her, a trait she has only recently reined in. Physically, my twin and I are different. I admit I have walked up to mirrors and said hello and I can and do confuse childhood pictures of myself and Catrin. The only clue to our identity is often

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the colour we are wearing. Still, if you look closely, she has a longer nose, a slimmer face and one ear sticking out. She has also grown up to be half an inch taller. Twins' personalities are also different. I remember one father of twins telling me his six-month-old daughters were "beginning to develop their own personalities". Our parents were at pains to encourage us to express our individuality. We were perplexed: we always knew we were

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individuals. It was everyone else who bracketed us together. The truth is that clones are different. Is this nature or nurture? Who knows? For every study of separated twins that points to strikingly similar life choices, there are pairs of twins who have been brought up together who have made radically different decisions. In my own case, I think my sister and I deliberately cultivated different talents so as not to be continually compared.

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When you are treated like a buy-one-get-one-free pack of toothpaste, you need your own territory. But none of this addresses the issue of why cloning scares the pants off most people. This is because it seems so unnatural, so artificial. It reeks of a smoking test tube and a luminous petri dish. And yet my sister and I are living proof that cloning is a naturally occurring phenomenon.

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Long before Messrs Antinori and Boisselier hit the headlines, cloning was as run of the mill as curly red hair or freckles - although an entire generation of Annies would, admittedly, be a pretty scary prospect.

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Source: http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,,872145,00.html