Wired's cover story this month is about cloning. In the article, many researchers say they believe someone has already cloned a human secretly because it would be so easy to do. The cover says someone will clone a human in the next year (the implication being if they haven't already). Animal cloning has become common place and many InVitro Fertilization techniques are very similar to cloning.

There are a lot of ethical implications. I'll be called crazy by people with a more 'scientistic' (sic) world-view, but there's are some pretty good reasons to believe that life happens at fertilization, at conception. Even attempting cloning takes a vary nonchalant stance toward zygotes and embryos.

Some people argue that the right to have a child for otherwise infertile couples is more important than caution about fertility techniques. Here's an example:

'For his part, Sauer would like to clone, too. Not adults, necessarily, but embryos. If Sauer could clone embryos from an IVF cycle and store them in case a pregnancy fails, or in case a woman wants a second child later on, much of the pain and expense of another round of IVF could be avoided. "It would be easy to clone identical embryos. That could be done right now in almost any IVF lab, to make three or four copies."'

Many of us believe those 'three or four copies' are alive, and we don't want people to take that life casually.

Now would be a good time, as I scan through the article again, to quote its best line:

'This is why Steen Willadsen says that if you want to create people who are identical, cloning might actually be a bad way to do it. "It is retrograde to clone," he says, a little tongue-in-cheek. "There are other ways of making people identical. We can put them through the same schools and subject them to eight hours of TV every day. That works a lot better. Why do you think Americans are buying SUVs?"'

Here's a quote from the end:

'Artificial human chromosomes were created four years ago, and "artificial sperm and eggs are pretty close now," Trounson says. Human beings may someday be designed from scratch, and microarray technology will end the guesswork. Ultimately, we may not even need mothers. Work on an artificial womb is progressing nicely.'

This is the kind of nonchalance I'm afraid of. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Not because clones might not have souls or will rise up and destroy us or other science fictions. Be afraid of the erosion of the value of human life, and the hubris so many of us seem to have, willing to take life into our own hands and redesign it in our own image.