August (Web-only) 2005

ARTICLE TOOLS

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This is the first entry in our newest weblog, Life Matters, a weekly roundup of news and commentary on issues of life: creating it, ending it, enhancing it, and treating it properly. We're pleased to announce that our blogger will be Nigel M. de S. Cameron, whose work in life ethics areas should be familiar to many readers of Christianity Today, where he has long served as a contributing editor.

Cameron is also research professor of bioethics and president of the Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future at Chicago-Kent College of Law in the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is director of the Council on Biotechnology Policy, senior fellow at the Wilberforce Forum and the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, and former provost of Trinity International University. He was the founding editor of Ethics & Medicine, and is author of The New Medicine: Life and Death After Hippocrates.

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In 1997, the announcement that Dolly the sheep had been cloned was an earthquake. There's not much doubt that the history books will see it as the opening shot of the "biotech century"—and maybe the first big step down the road to the Brave New World. But we soon got used to her unsmiling face on our newsmagazines, and as scientists have been busy cloning mice and cattle and cats, we have become used to it.

So now the Koreans have cloned a dog. The first cloned dog is an Afghan hound, with the weird name Snuppy (something about Seoul National University, it seems). But at least we have been spared a repeat of the locker-room humor that gave us Dolly's name (for those who missed the "joke," Dolly is named for Dolly Parton, with special reference to the breast tissue of Dolly's archetype from which the skin cell was taken).

As ...