Baby, It's You! And You, And You...

Mary had a little lamb, it's fleece was gray
It never had a father, just borrowed DNA.

It sort of had a mother though the ovum was loaned
It was not so much a lambkin as a baby lamb cloned.

And soon it had another clone and soon many, many more
They followed her to school everyday, cramming the corridor.

It made the kids laugh and the teachers' eyes roll
They were just too many of them for her to rule.

No one ruled the sheep as experiments didn't vary
So the scientists resolved it for all by cloning Mary.

But now they feel sheepish, those scientists all chary
One problem solved, but what to do with Mary, Mary and Mary.

-Anonymous Post

A brave new world of cookie-cutter humans, baked and bred, seemed in reach with the cloning of Dolly where multiple embryos were spawned just like loaves and fishes in the Bible and the argument that occupied scientists and ethicists for years, about how much man should interfere with nature when it came to reproduction, was dropped like hot coals on every kitchen table, every pulpit, every politician's desk. Our debate over issues like abortion and euthanasia suddenly seemed tame and transparent compared to the questions that human cloning raised.. .

It's not that anyone thinks there is a commandment 'Thou shalt not clone,' but there are ethical boundaries to what humans ought to be thinking about doing. For many, their individualism seemed to be endangered and it made them angry. A TIME\CNN poll showed that majority voters were indignant of the idea and they replied, "The people doing this ought to contemplate splitting themselves in half and see how they like it."

The knee jerk reactions came from fear and myophia. To many, clonophobia was more real than the news of Dolly. Ethics is a strong word but we need to look beyond the ethical issues here. And it's not an ethical issue. It's a medical issue. We have a duty here and need to think through the questions human cloning raises at different levels and we can't afford to throw the baby out with the bathwater so to speak. Humans need to complete the life cycle, to reproduce and cloning human embryos to assist infertile couples and studying genetic defects can help a baby avoid some stricken disease...

But all this is a mere flash in the pan. There is a long way to go between cloning a embryo made up of immature, undifferentiated cells and cloning adult cells that have already committed to becoming skin or bone or blood. All cells have in their DNA the information required to replicate the entire organism but in adult cells access to parts of that information has somehow been switched off. Scientists do not yet know how to switch it back on. Even so, inadvertently funding popular areas of research such as organ enhancement could impede finding solutions for other growing concerns such as Alzheimer's. Or, as WHO says, by 2015, we'd be walking around with huge dicks and breasts but not knowing what to do with 'em!