Brazen scientists are attempting to fill God's very big
shoes with the announcement in January that a team of fertility
specialists would embark on the world's first concerted effort to clone a
human being. The fact that there is only one Creator, and they are not
Him, leaves them seriously under-qualified for the job. Nevertheless, ever
since the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve wanted to "be like
God," man has labored futilely in his quest to conquer this
monumental task. This newest avenue is sure to raise countless ethical and
medical quandaries.
Cloning experts
who attended a research symposium in Rome, Italy, on Saturday, March 10,
said that a human would be successfully cloned within a year, according to
Associated
Press on March 12. The cloning team is led by Panayiotis Zavos, a
reproduction researcher from America, and includes Italian fertility
doctor Severino Antinori and Israeli researcher Avi Ben-Abraham. Brushing
aside the avalanche of criticism from around the world, they continue to
forge ahead under the humanitarian banner of vowing to "help
childless couples to become parents," as if current fertility
technology and adoption could not already fill that void. It takes more
than DNA to become a parent.
Cloning, or the process of fusing the nucleus of a
single adult cell (which contains the entire human genetic code) into the
empty nucleus of an egg cell, is prohibited in the United States but not
in Israel or Italy. An international ban which is part of a protocol to
the European Council's Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, has
been ratified by the Italian Senate but not the Lower House. The US
government passed amendments to the Gene Regulation Act 2000, making it a
jailable offence to put human cells into animal eggs. These amendments
provide a penalty of up to two years jail time for cloning a genetically
identical human. Researchers skirt current laws by using techniques which
do not result in identical copies – some DNA from the host egg is added
to the embryo – making it technically legal to perform in the
US.
Dolly the sheep was the first mammal successfully cloned
in 1996, but the Daily
Telegraph revealed on March 12 that human cloning has been
underway in Australia for 2 years. "It has never been publicly
admitted that we have already done human cloning in Australia,"
bio-ethicist Nick Tonti-Filippini said. "What is true is that human
embryos were produced. It was as much a human embryo as Dolly was a sheep.
To clone a whole human is only taking it one step further." High
ambitions won't necessarily produce the intended results, however, says
skeptics who are aware of the low efficiency of the techniques.
The road to achieving a human clone is paved with
medical uncertainty and failures, according to The
Washington Post on March 7. Clones develop problems, it seems,
because they are not made from sperm and eggs nwith
their properly imprinted DNAn
the way God created the reproduction process to work. Five species of
mammals have been cloned so far, all with
serious abnormalities. In fact, only 2% of cloning attempts result in a
live birth. Translated into human embryos, this would create countless
casualties n which, of course,
current abortion statistics have desensitized us to view only as
"blobs of tissue." The article stated that scientists who try to
clone a person will encounter the following obstacles:
"Almost all of the first 100 clones will abort
spontaneously because of genetic or physical abnormalities, putting the
health and lives of the surrogate mothers at risk. Of the handful of
clones that make it to term, most will have grossly enlarged placentas
and fatty livers. And of the three or four fetuses that may survive
their birth, most will be monstrously big n
perhaps 15 pounds n and will
likely die in the first week or two from heart and blood vessel
problems, underdeveloped lungs, diabetes or immune system deficiencies.
With access to an intensive care unit, perhaps one of those 100 clones
will survive."
With the exception of greatly enlarged
"bellybuttons," many of the clones appear perfectly normal at
birth, and only later begin to display the deformities. Clones tend to age
faster than mammals produced normally, as evidenced by Dolly the sheep.
Cattle embryos can grow so fast that they tear the muscles in their
mothers' belly walls. Some have grotesquely malformed heads. It is much
easier to decide what to do with a fatally-flawed cow than a
fatally-flawed child.
God never intended people to be photocopied. He has
created each unique individual for a purpose, as David declared in Psalm
139:13-16:
"For you created my inmost being; you knit me
together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and
wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My
frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, When
I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my
unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be."
One of God's greatest miracles is being perverted and
mocked as self-centered people seek to replicate themselves, or parents
try in vain to replace children whom they have lost. The Lord has
never given mankind the authority to take over the controls and
tamper with his greatest creation. When God created man, He saw that His
work was "very good," not to mention that the
"old-fashioned" reproduction process He designed sure beats test
tubes in an assembly line! Let's get off the throne and let the Author of
Life do His job. V bm TOP
