Tiny Human Life    page - 513 - X.    HUMAN GENETIC ENGINEERING: CLONING AND RECOMBINANT DNA "God  created  humans  in  His  Own  image.He  created  humanity  in  the  image  of  God...[both] male and female. God blessed them and God said to them: 'Be fruitful and multiply!'.... None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin...to uncover their nakedness.... The Lord called me from the womb. From the bowels of my mother He has mentioned my name.... The Lord formed me from the womb to be His servant....The Lord...forms the spirit of man within him. - Genesis 1:27f; Leviticus 18:6; Isaiah 49:1-6; Zechariah 12:1. 3644.   Human Genetic Engineering (alias HGE) embraces a variety of life-promoting procedures. All of them purport to "create" or to "improve" the human race in a pre-conceptional setting. HGE is not concerned with either post-conceptional or postnatal surgery (such as that involved in the  cutting  of  umbilical  cords,  or  the  separation  of  humanly-separable  Siamese  twins,  or appendectomies, or heart transplants). Such surgeries are subsequent to conception - and are variously either permissible or impermissible in the light of the eternal and comprehensive Law of God anent existent human persons.¹ Human genetic engineering, cloning, and genetic recombination 3645.   In  HGE,  we  are  concerned  solely  with  pre-conceptional  procedures  -  occurring  before  the existence of the person(s) to be most affected. HGE may be either non-conceptional or pro- conceptional. So we shall here look at pre-conceptional non-conceptional cloning - and also at the different pre-conceptional and pro-conceptional genetic recombinations - as distinct from post-conceptional embryonic improvements etc. 3646.   We shall not discuss CES (alias Corrective Embryonic Surgery) - till paragraphs 3799f at the end  of  this  chapter.  For  CES  -  although  some-times  miscalled  'genetic  engineering'  -  is essentially  different.  Indeed,  CES  does  not  alter  the  genes  or  the  pro-conceptional  cells  in organic matter prior to conception in the way both cloning and DNA recombinations do. 3647. Now by (non-conceptional) "cloning" is meant the non-spermatic and non-sexual duplication of artificial specimens genetically and sexually identical to the original specimen. 1952 saw the first successful cloning of frogs, from tadpole cells. Professor Dr. J.B. Gurdon, using the Briggs-King technique,² this by transplanting the nucleus of an intestinal cell from a tadpole (A) cloned a colony of identical South African claw-frogs. He did into the denucleated egg-cell of another frog of similar species (B). Very amazingly, the thus-stimulated egg-cell divided, and kept on dividing into a blastocystic cluster of several cells (which we here call C & D & E & F etc.). 3648.   Gurdon then divided those cells from one another, and impregnated each one of them (C & D & E & F etc.) into one of a similar number of denucleated egg-cells (0 & P & Q & R etc.). Each of the latter was similar to the original denucleated egg-cell B. Once cells C & D & E & F (etc.) had impregnated the denucleated egg-cells O & P & Q & R (etc.), the latter then developed into a whole colony (S & T & U & V & W & X & Y & Z etc.) of tadpoles (which in turn later became frogs). 3649.   Those several tadpoles (S & T & U & V & W & X & Y & Z etc.) were all identical both to one another and also to the first tadpole A from which the original cell had been taken. In this way, tadpole A had now been cloned into the "identical octuplets" (S & T & U & V & W & X & Y & Z etc.). Each of them was also an "identical twin" of its own "identical parent" A. So, A - through human agency - had been induced artificially to (re)produce (S & T & U & V & W & X & Y & Z                                                      1. Gen. 1:24-28; 7:2-9; 30:29-43; 38:18-27; Lev. 11:14-22; I Kgs. 3:16-28; I Cor. 15:8; etc. 2. See Smit's Cloning, p. 6.