Two years ago, a Canadian dentist called Michael Zuk bought a rotten molar belonging to the late John Lennon for $30,000 at auction. That purchase earned him way more than $30,000 worth of publicity, as Zuk notes proudly on his website, johnlennontooth.com.

Now that same dentist has announced he has Fedexed the tooth to "a U.S. lab" (he doesn't say which one) for DNA sequencing. "The DNA in John Lennon's tooth is easily worth over $25 million to the right company," Zuk writes. "It actually is priceless if it means we can clone the Beatle."

See also: Scientist Says Human Cloning Could be Possible in 50 Years

It would be easy to dismiss Zuk as a harmless publicity seeker, except for the fact that his plan (detailed in this press release) could actually happen. In May, for the first time in history, scientists announced they had cloned a human stem cell using a process called nuclear transfer — the same process that gave us Dolly the cloned sheep back in 1997.

The door to human cloning is wide open. It's just a question of who, or which nation, decides to walk through it first. Once that breakthrough happens, it's only a matter of time before we see DNA collectors like Zuk attempt to replicate history's greatest artists, musicians and scientists, for notoriety, publicity or otherwise.

The question is: should we? The answer: absolutely not. And from my reading on the life of Lennon, who was a contemporary of my Liverpool father, I sense he'd be monstrously offended by the idea too.

Double Fantasy

Think about it. This isn't a matter of sticking Lennon's tooth into a replication machine and having a fully-fledged Beatle step out the other end, ready to head to the recording studio.

Let's just say the process were successful, and you brought the resulting embryo to term. What you'd get would be the world's most scrutinized, screwed-up child.

Lennon lived his early years in the obscurity of suburban Woolton, Liverpool. He was abandoned by his father, shunned by his mother, and raised by his strict aunt Mimi. He loved listening to the wireless, especially the anarchic BBC comedy The Goon Show.

His life changed when he first heard Elvis Presley sing Heartbreak Hotel in 1956, the year his mother, now reconciled, bought him his first guitar. It changed again in 1957 when he met Paul McCartney at a local church fete, and it changed horrifically the following year when his mother was killed by a drunk driver.

The John Lennon we know and love was formed by all of these events. This isn't a nature versus nurture debate, it's simple fact. The young Lennon was as interested in drawing as making music, for example, and went as far as enrolling in the Liverpool College of Art before it turned out his band was going places.

Hey, You've Got to Hide Your Clone Away

So what would Zuk have to do with his John Lennon clone to get the same result? Stick him in a Truman Show-style environment, where an actor playing his father goes away to sea when the young Lennon is 5? Play him Goon Show and Elvis MP3s at just the right time? Have an actress play his mother and kill her off?

Somehow clone Sir Paul two years after the Lennon clone, so the two can meet at just the right age?

One hopes that the child would simply be allowed to live a normal happy life, but one doubts that this would happen. If you think you were pressured too much to play the piano or violin at an early age, that's nothing compared to what a Lennon clone would feel.

To say nothing of the media attention that would swarm around the boy everywhere he went. Ever heard of the Dionne quintuplets? That's the kind of freak-show environment we're talking about. If the kid has any of Lennon's willful personality, his first instinct would be to rebel against all expectations, and never pick up a guitar again.

Here's an idea: Instead of wasting millions of dollars trying to recreate the last John Lennon — a confluence of time, talent and circumstance that will never come again — how about putting that money into encouraging the 21st century's answer to John Lennon? How about funding music programs, now being slashed at schools across the nation? How about supporting your favorite up-and-coming band?

There's a strange historical coda to this whole story. Turns out it was another dentist who first introduced John Lennon to LSD in 1965 — by slipping it into his coffee without Lennon's knowledge or consent. Lennon may have gone on to have music-inspiring experiences with the drug, but it also nearly annihilated his personality.

In any case, Lennon never forgave the dentist in question. We can only hope, for the sake of Lennon's family, friends and fans, that this latest dentist with bizarre and non-consensual ideas will be less intent on following through.

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