ABSTRACT
The story for the year 1997 was the cloning controversy, the public debate over cloning human beings. Ian Wilmut, the laboratory midwife to the world famous sheep, Dolly, never intended to clone a human being. He still opposes the idea. 1 Almost everyone opposes the idea. Yet, the cultural explosion ignited by this new scientific achievement continues to spread fallout. The prospect of gaining too much control - too much choice - over our own evolutionary future elicits anxiety, fear, suspicion. Genetic science seems to be igniting fires previously smoldering in our primordial sensibilities. Science is secular. And when secular science enters our DNA, we fear it is entering a realm of the sacred. We fear a Promethean blunder. We fear that our own human hubris will violate something sacred in our nature, and we fear that nature will retaliate with disaster. To protect ourselves from a possible Promethean blunder by science, we are tempted to stop further research with the commandment: 'thou shalt not play God!'2
