The mystery remains Scientists need not be tone deaf to the mystery of life It's time to think before we clone
Garvey, John
JOHN GARVEY THE MYSTERY REHA1NS What cloning can't reproduce Hears ago Gore Vidal said that he thought human beings had already been cloned. "Anyone who says 'Have a nice day' is a clone," he...
...if the child turned out to be a female, the parents planned to abort it...
...but without a restoration of the sense of the sacred, of mystery, we will probably not be able to begin to make that argument, or even to understand it ourselves...
...Prisoners in China have been used as involuntary organ donors...
...In essence, cloning is the artificial fashioning of an identical twin, one that will be younger than its sibling...
...The role of the ethicist is not to refrain from such judgments, but very often to make them...
...When science becomes exclusively reductionist, it loses this sense...
...But it doesn't need to...
...Retaining this sense of wonder could lead a scientist to say, "Yes, we can do this...
...She said she hoped that ethicists "would concentrate their efforts on saying what we should do with this, rather than saying it shouldn't be done, because people have rightly said it can't be prevented...
...it would be interesting, and wrong...
...There were other ethical problems: a number of fertilized embryos were destroyed along the way toward cloning the sheep...
...The problem here is partly the confusion of science with technology...
...In an article in the New York Times Gustav Niebuhr quoted Notre Dame's Richard McCormick, who said that the obvious motives for cloning a human were "the very reasons you should not...
...The loss of this sense is almost a hallmark of our age, and in some sense the churches have been complicit in it...
...There is something Nazi-like about wanting to create "desirable" human beings, but we already use people as if they were property (as in the case of the prisoners) or try to create desirable children (as in the case of people who prefer male to female babies...
...The argument that we have a right to choose our time of death or to abort a child is similar: "Whose life, or whose body, is it anyway...
...But the sense of mystery and glory to be found in the best music (Bach or Arvo Part) and in the stillness at the heart of the vision of some wonderful painters and iconographers (Giotto or Andrei Rublev) can be experienced in the presence of natural phenomena, and should be...
...A reverence for mystery does not put a stop to our understanding or our desire to understand...
...Apply that to genocide or euthanasia...
...To attempt to create people with specific characteristics is to make single or multiple aspects of being human more important than the "beautiful whole that is the human person...
...Mystery" has taken on a muddled meaning: it is either the "booga booga" stuff that hovers around such TV shows as "The X Files," or it is seen as something so far beyond understanding that we might as well not think about it at all...
...Or for that matter the torture of small children...
...How's that...
...The real danger is the way the process moves us ever closer to the idea of the human being as product or property...
...There are ethicists who have no problem with the idea of cloning itself, but who worry only about its potential for misuse...
...Our answer must be: not yours, not mine, and not the state's...
...A more alarming sentiment was expressed by Nancey Murphy of the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena...
...rather, this desire is deepened...
...This gets it about right, I think...
...When churchgoers cannot find any sense of the sacred or of mystery in liturgy, where will they begin to learn to see it in natural processes or the physical world...
...it also led, predictably, to serious comments by ethicists, theologians, and scientists...
...One startling suggestion was that a dying child could be cloned, as a sort of replacement kid...
...A doctor I know has been asked more than once to determine the sex of an unborn child...
...As in the case of identical twins, the similarities will be intriguing, but so will the inevitable differences...
...There's a big loaf of them and they just keep slicing them off...
...Some things are clear: A cloned human being is still a human being, with all sorts of individual complications...
...People could be grown for body parts a liver with your exact DN A would probably not need an anti-rejection drug if it were transplanted...
...we have to say these things shouldn't be done at all...
...The body is not a form of property at all, except to a slavemas-ter...
...If something can be done and will be done we shouldn't say that it shouldn't be done...
...When a Scottish researcher cloned a sheep recently, the event set off another round of joking, some of it quite funny...
...This strikes me as being tone-deaf to mystery, to any sense of the sacred...
...That something can be done obviously does not mean that it should be...
...Almost everyone seems to assume that human beings will one day be cloned, and that the uses to which cloned humans might be put range from the nightmarish to the ludicrous...
...A sense of the sacred, the ability to be still before the mystery, is something which locates us exactly: we are where we are meant to be, who we are meant to be, in such moments...
...Knowing that adultery and murder will happen does not lead us to ask how they can best be used...
...Anyone who says 'Have a nice day' is a clone," he said...
...The desire to know is experienced in a context marked by deep humility and gratitude...
Vol. 124 • March 1997 • No. 6
