Word for the month of December

THE RISE OF THE ARTIFICIAL BABY

Shalom, to you my Friend and Co-Minister in the Great Commission...
   In the season of the celebration of Messiah's birth, a story that has to do with birth but sounds more like science fiction. One recent headline reads, Scientists say lab-grown sperm and eggs are just a few years away. According to the story, scientists are making gigantic strides toward creating human eggs and sperm in the laboratory. The process involves taking human adult cells, often skin or blood cells, then transforming them into stem cells, and then causing them to become sperm or egg cells. The cells are then grown in the laboratory. They have already accomplished something to this effect by creating mouse sperm and a human ovary from scratch.
   Scientists are hailing the discovery as a     cure-all for everything from infertility to cancer and aging, even population decline. They believe they have the answer to the dramatic plummet in childbirth rates seen in the industrial nations. Babies can now just be produced in the lab. One scientist expressed caution; but just a little bit:

   We need to be confident that it's safe before we could ever use those cells to make a baby. Ethical considerations also loom large, particularly regarding applications like solo parenting or multiplex parenting, where multiple individuals could contribute genetically to a single embryo.

   We need to be confident before artificially producing babies. Solo parenting would mean a parent deciding to create a child without a partner, perhaps a clone from their skin cells. Multiplex parenting would mean three, four, five, or conceivably any amount of people could become the genetic parents of a single baby.
   Beyond all this, is another article in which scientists are declaring that they will soon be able to create DNA from scratch-thus, an artificial human being. This also raises the question of designer babies or the rise of a super race.
   This all sounds like something out of a science fiction novel or movie because that is basically what it is. The idea of test tube babies was first popularized in the 1930s novel Brave New World by Alduous Huxley. That novel was based on test tube reserves of sperm and eggs. We have gone far beyond that now. Could this be a corollary of the Scripture that speaks of an end-time world in which men are without natural love?
   These days undoubtedly bear the signs of the last days, when man plays God and wars against what is natural. This month, let us pray for the future, for the new generation, and for revival. And may God greatly bless you as you do!

Your brother and co-laborer

in His love and service,


Jonathan