Theologian and ethicist, Gilbert Meilaender, offers an excellent essay on this topic in the February 2009 issue of First Things. Meilaender uses the news of a California company’s announcement about the successful cloning of human embryos to write his daughter inviting her consideration of the significance of such news and the nature of life.
Meilaender quotes the CEO of the company who, when asked if he had seen the cloned embryo, responded, “I have to admit, it’s a very strange feeling. It is very difficult to look at an embryo and realize it is what you were a few decades ago. It is you, in a way.” As Meilaender rightly observes, the executive’s comment speaks not simply to the scientific advancement that makes such cloning possible, but to the nature of human life.
One is reminded of Psalm 139: “Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them.”
Meilaender concludes his letter to his daughter thusly: “We can look in the microscope and see the truth; yet the truth is idle. It doesn’t really shape us – especially if it seems to demand we stop. ‘What does it profit a man,’ Kierkegaard writes, ‘if he goes further and further and it must be said of him: he never stops going further; when it must also be said of him: there was nothing that made him pause?’”