This January, an Italian doctor announced in Lexington, Kentucky, that he plans to clone a human in 2001. Defending his project in the name of helping couples unable to have children, the fertility expert said, "The goal to be a father, to be a mother, is a human right, an absolute human right."

In a related development, the U.K. government voted January 21 to allow British researchers to clone the genetic material of humans to pursue treatment of several serious diseases. The controversial vote was defended by some as having nothing to do with the cloning of humans and everything to do with the compassionate treatment of the ill.

Others said it had everything to do with cloning humans. The bill was challenged with equal passion by Lord Alton who warned that it was wrong to treat the human embryo as "just another accessory to be created, bartered, frozen or destroyed." He added, "These are not trivial questions that preoccupy a few moral theologians. They are at the heart of our humanity."

Half a world away, Japanese scientists have succeeded in circumventing that country's law banning the cloning of humans. They have, instead, succeeded in creating the technology that will allow them to clone human sperm. The scientific team from Tokyo believes they will also be able to re-program cells from men, literally producing eggs-so that a man could both "father" and "mother" children. In this confused world, their research would enable homosexual couples to reproduce.

Finally, the creation of "ANDi" was recently announced. ANDi is an anagram for "inserted DNA" spelled backwards. DNA from a jellyfish was inserted into the genes of a rhesus monkey, as an experiment to determine if genes could be transferred from one species to another. So far, it appears that the jellyfish gene is present in all of the monkey's cells. The next step is to determine if the monkey will reproduce itself, with its engineered genetic makeup.

Conservative columnist George Will warns that this is but a step away from human genetic "enhancement" and human cloning. He foresees that parents will "design" their children by selecting the traits they would prefer their offspring to possess.

Genetic engineering is being conducted in the name of medical research. Quoting biologist and ethicist Leon Kass, Will called it "moral myopia to think that all values must yield to the goals of better health and desirable traits. A cost of such yielding can be the reduction of human beings to the status of just another man-made thing. But such warnings may be overwhelmed by what Kass calls 'the technological imperative'-whatever science can do will be done."

Will concluded his column with this sober and stark warning: "ANDi is an intimation that nuclear explosions are not the only way science can end the human story. Biology might do that more gradually than physics can, but no less decisively, and even more repugantly."

Sources: UPI; BBC; Times Newspapers Limited, "The Monkey That Could Mean the End" by George Will, January 22, 2001.