Cloning
1997 a sheep named Dolly was
reported as being the first successful animal to be artificially cloned and
raised. This was, of course, a major breakthrough for science, because it was
long thought that the whole process of life from fertilisation upwards was far
too complex to be manipulated like this.
The problem has always been the
incredible intricacy. When sperm meets egg a vast number of chemical changes
take place. For most of last century, cloning seemed like a piece of science
fiction - something which only aliens from an advanced intergalactic race could
do.
But now human cloning is a
possibility.
A 55 year old Italian reproductive
engineer, professor Severino Antinori, announced this year that he is prepared
to clone humans in the near future. He and his team are actually planning the
procedure, despite many reservations from governments and smaller, concerned
groups. And despite comments by church leaders.
Mr Antinori is already well-experienced
in working with fertilization techniques. He specialises in helping rich,
infertile couples have children, and has already enabled two women over 50
become pregnant. Yet he describes himself as a "devout Catholic",
which seems to imply that he thinks he is working with the sanction, or even
the blessing of the church.
The
So where do Christians stand on this
subject?
The first Bible-based answer to
human cloning is simple: God designed humans to be raised by two parents, a
male and a female, a Mum and a Dad. Cloning removes parents from children, so
it abrogates God's best plan for children.
Another problem with human cloning
is the fact that the Bible describes humans as "made in the image of
God", which means that humans are not animals. It is all very well to
clone plants and animals, because God gave the whole realm of Nature to Mankind
as his dominion, but Man is not included. Man is separate and apart from Nature.
It is also not unusual for cloning
to occur, in Nature. Many plants, animals and insects use cloning as a
replication technique. Humans are free to take advantage of this technique, and
they do, for example in the division of strawberries from the parent plant.
A third problem is the Bible's
insistence that human life starts at conception, in the womb. Like the Chinese,
the Western world would do well to count nine months on to every life, instead
of clebrating year one 12 months after birth. In the Bible, God often address
people who are not yet born (for example Jeremiah, John, Jesus) because humans
are not inanimate blobs before birth. They are unbirthed humans.
It is this view which also argues
that abortion is, from the Biblical point of view, the killing of a human - and
not just the removal of some meaningless thing called a fetus. Some Christians
view abortion as murder.
But there are other problems with
human cloning.
One thing which scientists didn't
anticipate with Dolly was her premature ageing. They now know that when a cell
divides, a string of nucleotides at the end of the DNA always becomes shorter.
These 'beads' called telomeres actually determine the lifespan of the cell.
Dolly was cloned using already aged cells, so she inherited the shorter
telomeres, and thus aged far more quickly than a normal sheep. Will this happen
with human clones? And if it does, it is fair to produce a child which becomes
an old man or old woman long before they should?
A further problem with cloning
humans is the possibility of mistakes in the DNA, creating deformed and
non-viable humans. In the case of Dolly, it took 200 attempts before a
successful egg was produced. If this was a human egg, it is possible that 199
'potential' human babies would have had to die before a healthy one was born.
And what if a cloned human marries
and has children? Where is the family tree? Some races would find it extremely
unsettling to have children with no ancestry.
The Catholic church, to its great
credit, has announced that it totally opposes human cloning, both reproductive
and therapeutic. One reason it gives for this stand is based on the
devaluing of children. There must be a built-in incentive, it argues, if human
cloning goes forward, for greedy people to exploit the cloned offspring for
various unsavoury purposes. A clone may become a mere commodity, raised for its
organs. Many children may be treated as cattle, or spare parts, for the unscrupulous.
Cloning, as you can see, is a
difficult issue to sort through.
The line is drawn right down the
middle, between those who believe human life is unique in the universe, and
those who don't.
The pragmatists, evolutionists, and
others, have no qualms, because they see no difference between, say, aphids
cloning on a rose bush and humans cloning in a glass beaker. Many Christians,
however, have huge reservations, because they see the implications of dabbling
with something as unique and precious as human life.
It may all come down to one question
: what does it mean to be a human?