The Raelians are a US-based cult preparing the human race for the arrival of superior aliens. They boast of funding scientists who will be the first to clone a human being, perhaps this month. In an appeal to human sympathy, the Raelians plan to resurrect a dead 10-month-old boy and place him in his grieving parents' arms.
The Raelians promise the very thing Christianity promises through faith - eternal life. But they promise the reverse also - to create lives acceptable to them. And who decides whose life is acceptable? And how will the Raelian miracle baby feel when he finds he was not welcomed into the world as his unique self but as a copy of someone else? The competition to be the first scientist to clone a human is our decade's version of the Moon race. Perhaps this year Neil Armstrong's "one small step for mankind" will be echoed with the first steps of the first cloned baby. What we won't see are the thousands of deformed rejects.
Human cloning is the Pandora's Box of the 21st century. On the surface, comparing those who seek to destroy life with those who wish to create it seems ludicrous. You cannot compare the noble intentions of the cloning industry with those of mass murderers. However, what these self-appointed gods have in common is the folly of believing that they have a right to make decisions for the rest of humanity.
And there is always the risk that not all cloning scientists will have noble intentions. One of those hoping to be the first to clone a baby is Italian doctor Severino Antinori - who pushed ethical boundaries when he enabled a 62-year-old woman to become a mother through embryo implantation. By offering infertile men an alternative to donor sperm, the opportunity to spawn their own genetic stock, Antinori convincingly presents himself as a compassionate life-creator. Who dares argue?
On an emotional level it makes sense to do all that is medically possible to help an infertile couple have a child. Intellectually, however, we need to ask whether everything in life can be fixed. Sometimes we have to live with infertility, just as with death. Are the needs of a minority of infertile couples worth the risk of turning humanity into a lucrative product line? When we accept that people are products rather than individuals we change our definition of what it is to be human. At worst we are dehumanising everyone by making each and every one of us replaceable.
Grieving parents of dying children are already collecting tissue samples for future cloning. This puts our entire concept of life and mortality up for grabs. Because what makes us human is our need to come to terms with mortality, our need to grieve and to accept the random nature of who lives and who dies.
To be human is to be a unique creation based on chance: the attraction between two people and the genes coming together with a roll of the DNA dice. With cloning, the father sees the birth of his twin. While we imagine this happening in the context of warm family relationships, the potential reality is that those who don't want to bother with relationships may narcissistically re-create themselves. Single women who become pregnant with donor sperm are already doing this to a degree.
Children's rights are never discussed in this context. If a child is cloned to provide bone marrow for a sibling with leukaemia, we are assuming we have the right to conceive a child not out of love, but out of need. How will such children feel when they discover that it was their marrow, and not them, that was desired?
Children die. We die. Resurrection by harvesting a woman's egg and inserting into its nucleus the DNA of the person being copied, only brings back a copy-cat body and certain genetically based personality traits. Those who favour cloning argue that clones would be no more like or unlike their hosts than twins are. Personality is about 50 per cent genetic and 50 environment. Even identical twins inexplicably differ in their personalities.
So what happens when the clone you ordered is not the person you expected? Will you be able to send it back? Could we have the ultimate two-tier society, where "types" society favours are reproduced while those seen as burdens are aborted? Or, in the Third World, left to die of curable diseases?
The peril lies in renegade scientists making these decisions on our behalf. While some countries have banned cloning, others haven't, leaving many scientists free to play God - without the permission of the human race. Secrecy surrounds the area because many scientists are terrified that public opinion will go against them.
No one has asked the views of the Irish public yet (one can only imagine the referendum), but a US poll found that three out of four people objected to cloning to allow infertile couples to have children or clones created to save the life of the person being cloned. Nine out of 10 were against cloning to allow gay couples to have children, or parents to re-create a lost child, or to create genetically superior human beings.
If ever there was a case where mankind needed to get together internationally and form a worldwide policy, this is it. But we couldn't stop the atom bomb or genocide, could we?