c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(AT)interpath.com.)

UNDATED _ Weeks after a sheep named Dolly was cloned, I’m still waiting for my sense of moral outrage to kick in. But it doesn’t.

Instead, I find that a Scottish scientist’s cloning of a sheep from a ewe’s mammary cell stirs these reflections:

First, what’s new about this?

I grew up amid a veritable hotbed of genetic engineering _ the cornfields of Indiana, where producing hybrid seed is considered science at its best. Every year, teen-agers flock to the fields as temporary genetic engineers. They call it”detasseling,”removing the tassels from seed corn plants so they don’t catch unwanted pollen. The results of hybridization are sturdier plants and higher yields.

Next month, millions will place bets on which horse breeder’s skill at genetic engineering will win the Kentucky Derby. Is the cloning of a sheep all that different from harvesting super-sperm from prize horses for breeding purposes?

Second, what exactly is the problem?

Germany’s”Der Spiegel”magazine went straight to everyone’s dread, with a cover showing a parade of five identical Hitlers, four identical Einsteins, and three identical supermodel Claudia Schiffers. Similar overreactions have greeted other advances of science, from discoveries by Copernicus to Galileo, to automobiles, to intelligence tests, birth control and nuclear fission.

It is possible to imagine the very worst of any development. But that very worst isn’t an automatic outcome made inevitable by the invention itself, but is an outgrowth of human decisions. The issue isn’t splitting the atom as such, it’s the choice fearful humans made to use split atoms for mass destruction. Third, the problem is people, not science. People have the power to misuse anything. As my 5-year-old son said seriously while asking for two more marshmallows,”Too much of anything can be bad for you.” TNT builds highways and destroys towns. Fertilizer enhances crops and blasts a courthouse in Oklahoma City. Engraving produces art and counterfeit money. It all depends on how we use it _ emphasis on the”we.” Some responses to Dolly foresee the cloning of humans and the shattering of conventions about parenting. In a society where one in four births is to an unwed teen-age girl, where one in four women will suffer sexual abuse, and over half of all American children will spend at least some time in a single-parent home, I’d say conventions of parenting are already in flux. If we’re going to organize worrying about parenting, let’s go after incestuous dads.

Will some dictator clone an army of superheroes? Maybe. Dictators have a long history of using whatever weapons are at hand. So do the people who fight against them. The issue isn’t the science that provides weapons, but the breakdown of community that leads to their use.

Fourth,”Dr. Strangelove”is a fiction.

If the ancients demonized women as the source of all evil, modernity tends to pick on scientists. Even as we enjoy microwave cooking, personal computers, plastic wrap and satellite TV, we portray scientists as mad, malevolent, uncivilized, and totalitarian tools. Nonsense. To my knowledge, scientists are people with active curiosity.

Can we trust scientists with the skill of cloning? What choice do we have? Science knows no bounds. The whole point of science is to break through boundaries. The possibility some scientists might abuse their skill, clone a human being and sell that cloning capability to, say, Saddam Hussein, or some vain Hollywood starlet, is hardly justification for putting a lid on curiosity.

Besides, given a choice, I’d rather trust the inquisitive biologist than the self-serving politician who would regulate him.

Finally, God is still God.

I’m intrigued the religious community is leading the outrage against Dolly’s cloner. Do we not believe identity comes from God? From a Christian perspective, when did genetic integrity replace one’s relationship with Jesus as the central fact of one’s development as a person?

Some religious folks worry replication of humans would be elitist. Of course it would! Our world runs on the fuel on elitism. Why else are one-third of humanity’s children starving to death while my local supermarket has 120 linear feet of cereal on display? If the religious community is going to target elitism, we’ve got a lot more than mutant sheep to worry about, starting with our own churches.

MJP END EHRICH