Martin E. Marty

About the author: Martin E. Marty, senior editor of the Christian Century magazine, is a professor of the history of religion at the University of Chicago and director of the Public Religion Project, a nonprofit group that analyzes the role of religion in American life.

The common reactions to the prospect of human cloning are revulsion and fear, but these feelings are based on deeper concerns. Though reproductive technologies have been applauded in the past because they produce children, cloning is different. Cloning assaults the distinctive genetic individuality of humans in a way that other reproductive technologies do not.

An instinct by humans to protect their distinctiveness is evident in the first responses to the announcement that a scientist in Scotland has cloned an adult sheep. The biologist Ian Wilmut and the sheep Dolly have...