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In
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 Vatican, however, has been reported as describing his work as
"grotesque".
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?