The idea of giving life to an exact replica of a human being has been swirling around in the imaginations of many a mind in the past.

The twentieth century has brought incredible technological advances to science and medicine. Only now has the idea of cloning become physically possible.

Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute outside Edinburgh, Scotland, announced in 1997 that he had successfully completed the cloning of a mammal. On the 278th try, the world’s first cloned sheep was born. They called her Dolly.

The procedure started with his team extracting the nucleus of a cell from an adult sheep. They used an electric pulse to fuse this with an embryonic cell whose nucleus had been removed. Normally, this hybrid will refuse to become an embryo. The key to Wilmut’s breakthrough was in coaxing this cell to “wake up” long dormant genes which are stored in their nuclei.

The twist that they devised was to “starve” the cells for a week, depriving them of nutrients, which somehow altered their protein scaffolding. This tricked the cells into reactivating their dormant genes and reverting back to an embryonic state.

Enormous medical benefits could come from this such as perfect organ donor matches. However, cloning sheep is only the forerunner for human cloning. There are two major areas that are preventing the creation of a human clone other than it being illegal in all countries of the world except the Netherlands.

First of all, is it morally right to force our own genetic desires onto our offspring, who have no say in the matter? Do clones have a soul? It’s against religious beliefs. If clones are produced in order to ‘harvest their organs,’ what happens if they refuse to be sacrificed? Where do they get their individuality and essence from? Do clones have legal rights or are they simply for slave work? Who chooses who lives and who dies, after all they’re still human, right?

Secondly, a recent study showed that only a very small percent of cloned animal embryos survived till birth; those that did last full-term were not healthy. Also abnormalities in their DNA even appear in the ‘normal’ cloned animal.

Reports continue to surface of an increasingly wide range of defects in cloned animals, including enlarged tongues, squashed faces, defective immune deficiencies and diabetes. If human cloning goes ahead, how many of them will be deformed or have similar health problems to sheep? Could new diseases erupt from cloning? How many imperfect clones will die before the ‘perfect’ clone comes along?

Many more questions need answers and they’re only going to get them from God. After all, He created the human being didn’t he? Humans creating or trying to copy other humans is of course destined for failure for this simple reason: God is perfect. He knew exactly what He was doing. Until the first cloned human is created, we’ll just have to keep asking questions and pray that the right decisions will be made.