News that President Shapiro has the ear of President Clinton on the ethics of cloning should come as no shock to anybody. After all, if you need an expert on the rights and wrongs of endlessly stamping out organisms who are all exact copies of one another, you could do worse than the President of Princeton University. It's well known that Princeton perfected human cloning years ago. It now operates at a pitch of perfection undreamt of by the Aldous Huxleys of this world.

The press seem unaware of this. Every major news magazine has run a picture of the two Dollies in the past few weeks. People have dug up their copies of Brave New World and tried not to get it confused with 1984. But no-one has yet come to Princeton for a vision of what the future holds. I think this is because the University Administration has so far managed to keep up the fiction that new students are recruited from around the country each year. The truth, of course, is that so-called "incoming" freshmen are grown on-site, and have been for years. Besides the Administrators, the only people who know about this process are the long-suffering graduate students (or "drone farmers" as we call ourselves). In revealing the full extent of this system, I may be putting myself in great danger. Frankly, though, my University stipend is so small that I really have nothing to lose anymore. Goodbye Dolly, hello Hal. Here"s how it works.

The raw material for each year's undergraduate batch is stored in the food- preparation areas of the dining halls. Workers in the Princeton Undergraduate Development System (PUDS) take basic organic chemicals and pre-process them for shipment to the growth vats. Any substandard organic material is assigned a random label ("onion rings" "marinara sauce," "New England Clam Chowder") and fed to existing P-clones. Occasional outbreaks of Mad Cow Disease in Rocky dining hall have not deterred this practice.

The primary production centre is on Nassau Street, cleverly disguised as a series of innocent retail outlets. Amino-acids are synthesised in the Home-Brewing shop next to Burger King. Reverse RNA transcription and basic protein synthesis is done in Small World. From there, the newly formed embryos are taken to the Growth Vats, which are on display behind the bar in Triumph Brew-Pub. This process has recently been upgraded and is now fully controlled by the computers in Totally Wired. Once hatched, the rapidly developing embryos are moved to the basement of Green Hall, where Psychology graduate students subject them to an accelerated (and sometimes messy) process of language-acquisition, early socialisation and toilet training. They then move up a couple of floors to Sociology (my own section) where we introduce them to one another for the first time, teach them how to use a credit card and repeatedly show them recordings of "90210" which provides a solid store of false childhood memories.

Batches are then divided by their future functions. All members are given a name and an identifying batch number (for example, P-99, P-00, and so on). They quickly learn to identify and associate only with their fellow batch-members. This makes it much easier to identify specimens in the field. We have found that most batch members voluntarily retain their number somewhere on their clothing at all times. By the time they are shipped to Dillon Gym for formal identification, all memories of their early life in the vats have been completely erased.

From there, the system pretty much runs itself. Very little external monitoring is required. The P-clones quickly learn to conform to existing standards of behaviour, opinion and dress. (A suitably minor amount of variation is permitted.) As with any large-scale production process a few duds may slip through quality control, but anyone showing an unhealthy independence of mind is generally discovered and weeded out by batch members themselves. During their second year of development, a genetically pre- programmed switch trips and the functional specialisation begins. Subgroups appear within the batches -- Jock, E-Quad Loser, Aerobics Queen, Investment Banker Jerk -- and pursue their own phylogenetic paths. Not all P-clones successfully trigger in this way. These failures tend to describe themselves as "Freelance Writer" or "Planning to Tour Europe." In fact, after graduation they are tracked down by a team of harvesters and brought back to PUDS for reprocessing.

In the long term, P-clones have functioned quite well in the outside world. Shortly after graduation, a batch-member's annual-giving gene (located on chromosome 12) activates itself. It produces a chemical that compels the individual to donate a large chunk of their income to the University each year. Long-term studies show that its effect increases with age. P-clones are also programmed to return to campus at 5 or 10 year intervals for servicing. This is an inefficiency we hope to eliminate when the new fourth- generation superclones come on line next year: if things go as planned, these models will require no maintenance, be remote-controlled from Nassau Hall and will self-destruct if they fail to donate a sufficient amount of money in a year.