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Imagine you're a mother, and you've just heard your doctor tell you that your only child, a five-year-old girl, has been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. Over the next years—with painful blood marrow transfusions to delay the inevitable—you will slowly watch her die.

Then your doctor offers you back her life. It will be a simple procedure. The genetic material from one of her liver cells—screened of the leukemia defect—will be fused into one of your own unfertilized egg cells. Inside your womb, then, you can raise another daughter, identical to the first. With no risk of complications or rejection, your first daughter will receive a life-saving bone marrow transplant from her new sister, a younger twin. A clone.

Now the decision is yours and your husband's: let your daughter die, or accept a double gift from medical technology—continued life for your five-year-old, and a second daughter to love and cherish. Along with this decision, as a Christian, you have to face another question. What is right in God's eyes?

Eight months ago, a situation like this would have been considered science fiction. Now, since the news of a world-famous sheep named Dolly, the impossible has become startlingly likely—genetic scientists are able to clone adult mammals, the equivalent of producing identical twins. And this is only the media-frenzy tip of an immense iceberg that has been drifting almost invisibly over the last two decades—through genetic manipulation, scientists have the ability to mold the very clay of all life. In short, it seems God is no longer the only potter at the wheel.

What are scientists capable of? At the University of Basel in Switzerland, for example, researchers inserted a specific gene into fly larvae regions normally destined to become wings, legs, antennae, and other body parts. The fruit flies hatched with up to fourteen pairs of eyes.

Other researchers have successfully transplanted human fetal organs into laboratory animals, creating "humanized" mice for scientific experimental use. Human genes have been implanted into the permanent genetic code of mice, sheep, pigs, cows, and fish.

Some might say scientists will never experiment on humans. Yet a few years ago at George Washington University—with permission from a local review board because the embryos were deemed flawed—researchers Jerry Hall and Dr. Robert Stillman used a procedure to split developing human embryos. With seventeen microscopic embryos, the scientists produced forty-eight clones. The clones were allowed to grow up to six days, then destroyed.

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