Playing God
“Playing God has been a common metaphor for describing and redirecting the activities of scientists, physicians, and other health care professionals. They have been criticized for usurping God’s power- for instance, the power over life and death- by letting patients die or by using new reproductive technologies.(1) The metaphor is generally used to identify two aspects of divine activity that should not be imitated by humans: God’s unlimited power to decide and unlimited power to act. Critics frequently focus on human arrogance and rebellion in daring to “play God.” In a typical statement, Paul Ramsey writes: “Men ought not to play God before they learn to be men, and after they have learned to be men they will not play God.” (2)Thus,
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For thousands of years, farmers have been using animals that have shown preferable characteristics as breeding stock, be it climatic resilience or suitability to certain climates. This has already been taken to an extreme with the rapid rise of factory farming, which seeks to maximise productivity above all else.
Cloning, is the process of making a genetically identical organism through nonsexual means. The aim of cloning farm animals is to produce replicas of the animals with the highest economic value, for instance the highest-yielding dairy cows or the fastest-growing pigs and it has taken intensive farming even further by treating farm animals as the ultimate commodity and manipulating them at cellular level in order to prioritise their productive characteristics. It has been used for many years to produce plants too (even growing a plant from a cutting is a form of cloning).
Animal cloning has been the subject of various scientific experiments for years but only gained little attention until the birth of the very first cloned mammal in 1996, a sheep named Dolly. Since then, scientists have began to clone other animals like cows and mice. The recent success in cloning animals has sparked fierce debates among politicians, scientists, and the general public about the use, morality and ethnicity of cloning animals, plants and possibly