Dolly, the Clone

Genesis 1:28
“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

In the Spring of 1997, a lamb named Dolly was born to become famous as the world’s first genetically identical copy of an adult female sheep. In other words, she was a clone. Eventually, Dolly developed lung cancer and was put to death in February 2003.

Cloning is not a human invention. The Creator Himself included this way of reproduction among many plants and insects. Man has been making use of this process for hundreds of years to propagate, say, the most disease-resistant wheat or the best-tasting apples. In other words, each generation of wheat or apples are an identical copy of the good one before it. However, cloned plants are one thing, but Dolly was the first mammal to be artificially cloned, and this has caused concern, not only among Christians but also among many scientists and politicians.

The doctrine of evolution teaches that mankind evolved from the animal kingdom. With the success of Dolly, the concern is that mankind is next in line for cloning experiments. Every set of identical human twins are actually clones, so there is no need to artificially clone for psychological studies; these have already been done. There were actually 276 living but defective embryos produced before the success of Dolly. The ultimate concern is how many living but defective human embryos will have to be destroyed before the experiments are successful?

Prayer:
Heavenly Father, You have created all living things in marvelous ways and human beings in Your own image. Please have mercy on those who would be presumptuous enough to attempt to reproduce human beings in their own image. Amen.

Notes:
Photo: Dolly, stuffed. Courtesy of Toni Barros. (CC-SA-2.0)