NEWS FEATURE: Is Dolly a lamb of God or an act of forbidden science?

c. 1997 Religion News Service UNDATED _ Theologians and medical ethicists were as amazed and appalled as the rest of the world by news this week that a Scottish scientist had successfully cloned a sheep from the mammary cell of a ewe, creating a genetically identical animal without benefit of a male parent. The optimists […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Theologians and medical ethicists were as amazed and appalled as the rest of the world by news this week that a Scottish scientist had successfully cloned a sheep from the mammary cell of a ewe, creating a genetically identical animal without benefit of a male parent.

The optimists among them considered the sheep, known as Dolly, very much a lamb of God, one more manifestation of divine intelligence guiding human action on the frontiers of knowledge. Others viewed Dr. Ian Wilmut’s livestock experiment at the Roslin Institute as a step into a forbidden area: meddling with the creative work only God can do.


Vatican officials called for an outright ban on all human cloning and urged scientists not to genetically alter animal species. Southern Baptist and United Methodist leaders in the United States issued similar calls for a cloning ban. In previous years, they invoked bans on gene patenting.

But other religious thinkers resist the idea of automatically outlawing new genetic discoveries, suggesting instead a moratorium on cloning experiments until scientists and ethicists sort out the issues.”One of the most important things people of faith must do is to get their facts straight,”said Robert Russell, executive director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley, Calif.”You can’t just take a (religious) tradition that has been worked out in centuries of cultural shift and apply it like a cookbook to a new discovery. You must be certain of the issues at stake before you go about condemning them.” In the secular world, President Clinton established a commission of experts to guide U.S. policy on the matter. Testifying before Congress Wednesday (Feb. 26), National Institutes of Health Director Harold Varmus termed the idea of cloning humans”repugnant”and said research on animal cloning should proceed with caution.

The human implications of Wilmut’s experiment turn upside down conventional ideas of motherhood, fatherhood and human identity, and raise new questions about the links between genetics and consciousness.

Body and soul, once considered by some to be completely separate entities, may be far more closely intertwined than anyone believed. And as scientists uncover what appear to be genetic links to behavior, the question of sin and moral culpability could become more obscure.

And then there were the jokes.”Liberal Protestants thought even God couldn’t do an immaculate conception,”cracked Lutheran theologian Ted Peters.”Now there’s undeniable proof that it’s possible.” While it’s unlikely that humans will anytime soon give birth to multiple genetic replicates of themselves, the cloning of Dolly has added more urgency to a whole array of biomedical and moral issues, said Peters, who has written extensively on bioethics and theological issues related to genetic research.”I’m not in favor of wildcat cloning, nor do I think it should be banned forever and ever,”Peters said.”But if there’s sufficient reason for caution, then we can wait and hear why we should go ahead.” Banning human cloning would not prevent the nightmare scenarios of totalitarian governments harvesting squadrons of cloned commandos genetically equipped with fighting instincts. The real nightmare scenarios, in Peters’ view, would be intentional or unintentional genetic damage done by private reproductive technology clinics that would sell cloning services. “That’s where the energy will be put,”he said.”And the outcome of that is an intuitive puzzle. It’s possible that we would discover that cloning would not produce permanent psychological or physical damage to children: They could be like twins or triplets, genetically identical with their own unique consciousness and identity. But we don’t really know what people who are in it for profit are going to be selling.” In Robert Russell’s view, the issues around cloning are more ethical than theological:

_ Will the poor as well as the rich benefit from the fruits of research, be it milk from high-yield cows or access to replacement body parts?

_ Will humans and animals risk losing their dignity and be reduced to commodities?

_ Will the outcome benefit the common good, or fulfill the desires of an affluent few seeking immortality or the replication of a loved one?


Several ethicists interviewed agreed that human cloning is secondary to a more pressing genetic issue: the implications of human germline intervention _ the alteration of defective genes that cause, for example, the hereditary disease cystic fibrosis. Scientists are close to perfecting techniques that would allow them to cure the disease, not only in a human embryo, but as the child matures to adulthood, in his or her offspring, generation after generation.

The technique has the potential for great good _ and massive harm. If a mistake were made in the manipulation of the gene, it would be impossible to correct in future generations. Germline intervention has been outlawed in Germany and several other European countries, but the United States has yet to develop policies for such procedures.

Rabbi Moshe Tendler, a professor of microbiology who holds a chair in Jewish medical ethics at Yeshiva University in New York, has a scientist’s appreciation of how cloning and germline intervention cut both ways on the ethical scale: The impulse to conquer disease and improve health leads scientists forward into unknown territory.

But the possibility of making an irreversible mistake represents a venture into what some religionists consider forbidden science.”The biblical attitude is that God says `Be fruitful and multiply, fill the Earth and master it.’ But the mastery is not over man: Man is the forbidden fruit,”Tendler said.”Only God can master man.” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

To permanently modify a genotype has the capacity for evil, he said, because of the great risks involved.”Any error you make is permanent, eternal,”he said. Similarly, implicit in the impulse to provide the childless with cloned offspring or to extend human longevity with cloned body parts is the evil of eugenics. “By declaring one human worthy of being replicated is to also declare other humans to be less worthy,”he said.

Tendler favors a ban on cloning for routine use as a method of reproduction, but suggests there might be case-by-case exemptions to the ban. But he said he has little confidence members of the scientific and medical communities have a highly enough evolved sense of ethics to use the new genetic technologies wisely.”Medical students listen to an ethics lecture from me for only one hour in six months of other classes. That’s not enough,”he said.”The family and organized religion have utterly failed to teach people how to be ethical. Our only hope is to recognize that moral and ethical awareness is a responsibility of the educational system, beginning in kindergarten and extending all the way up, through graduate schools, residencies and post-doctoral programs. At the moment no formal, authoritative instruction is being done on how to treat a patient morally and ethically,”he said.


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Philip Boyle, senior vice president of the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Faith, Health and Ethics in Park Ridge, Ill., expressed the fear that in the rush to cash in on this latest scientific advance, the Judeo-Christian tradition will be left in the dust.”These questions of the changing nature of parenthood and human identity have been around since the birth of the first test-tube baby in 1978,”he said.”But religions tend to cut a narrow swath. … No one played out what it means to bring human life into existence, to take bone marrow and produce an image of ourselves.” By remaining largely silent on these issues, Boyle said, organized religion is increasingly becoming a token voice in the ongoing public debate on emerging genetic technologies.

In a recent interview on CNN, Boyle found himself fielding a clutch of”soul questions”that indicated how ill-equipped people are to grapple with the moral, ethical and spiritual implications of these new technologies.”What happens if I give birth to myself?”one woman asked.”If I sin, does my clone sin?””Obviously, we don’t have the microscopes to determine whether a clone has a soul or a consciousness,”he said.”But people forget that we’ve had clones for a long time. They’re called identical twins. If you have separate, individuated matter, that means you have a soul.” But the idea that human technology can play a role in what was once considered a divine action creates, in Boyle’s view, a whole new set of mysteries.”If we think of the soul as somehow a divine action … and if we discover that we can transmute that, then humans have far more … control over their lives and their behavior,”he said.”It shows new ways God is present in human action.”

MJP END CONNELL

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