Post Scripts: Do we really want to change conception?

I hate to read about cloning. First it was connected with sheep and, I’ve heard, even a few hogs. Now there are those in our society who want to experiment with creating human beings from other human beings; not in the normal fashion God provided us humans, but rather in a scientific laboratory in test tubes. No one has explained fully the need for such a procedure and I haven’t run across anybody who wasn’t real happy with the present system.

Those most active in this project are a group of scientists who call themselves "Raelians." It is an organization with a membership of, perhaps, 50,000. They have come to believe that humans were created through the intelligent design of extraterrestrials (space people) and that a continuation of the creative cycle, and the secret of life itself, can be revealed by creating a baby boy in a test tube.

They will clone others, of course, but this baby boy is a ten month old infant who died during a botched operation to correct a heart defect. The parents, who are not identified, have already committed $500,000 to the project, which is called Clonaid. A lady by the name of Brigette Boisselier has been given the title of project manager and 55 other Raelian members have volunteered as surrogate mothers to raise the chances of success.

You may recall that in 1997 a Scottish researcher, Ian Wilmut, introduced Dolly the sheep – the first clone of an adult mammal – to an uneasy public. During the process, Wilmut and other scientists replace the nucleus in a sheep’s unfertilized egg, with the nucleus from an adult sheep’s mammary gland. Then they coaxed the egg to begin dividing as if it had been fertilized, tricking the donor nucleus into resetting its genes precisely to their early embryonic state – allowing the new sheep embryo to be implanted into the uterus of a surrogate mother.

Whew! Got all that?

Human cloning would work much the same way to produce an identical copy of a person. Rest easy, folks. The Raelians declare they are not ready to create a clan of cloned humans. In fact, Boisselier was fired from her l2-year position with the French Chemical giant, Air Liquide, because, the official news release stated, her involvement was taking too much time away from her work.

This has not stopped her beliefs in unorthodox human reproduction. She says she has received inquiries from infertile couples, parents heartbroken over the loss of a child, gays and lesbians, and older single men and women who reason that raising a belated "twin" would be simpler than trying to find a partner to conceive a child in the old-fashioned way.

I think I speak for millions of people around the world who don’t care one bit for the experiments in progress in relation to cloning. I have not found anything wrong with the present system that results in children. I do not believe many ordinary people want to change the manner in which children are conceived. I am willing to leave conception in the hands of the Good Lord who had made conception one of the richest blessings we humans share.

My gut feeling is nobody has a clue relating to cloning a human. It’s like throwing a rock in the dark, hoping to hit something you cannot even see. I’m content to leave it that way.