Here's a subject full of controversy: human cloning.

Ever hear of G. Richard Seed? He's hellbent on cloning a human being. Government, activists, and ethics be damned. And he's starting with himself.

Mr. Seed is a physicist with three degrees from Harvard University. Want to know what he thinks about cloning? In an interview with Richard Kardrey of Wired Magazine (March 1998), Mr. Seed states:

"First of all, I believe in God. Second, I'm a Christian. Third, I'm a Methodist, a very serious Methodist. The Bible says that God made Man in his own image. The Bible also says that Man will become one with God.

To explain this, let me digress a little: During the first few hundred years of the Christian church, there were constant arguments and debates. One of the big arguments was about the resurrection of Christ. Was the resurrection in spirit or was the resurrection in body? This was a schism of major proportions.

It was settled around the third century, and the resolution was that Christ was resurrected in both spirit AND body. This is still the doctrine in Christian churches all over the world.

The same interesting question is present now. When God intends to meet Man with himself, is that in spirit or in body? I choose the interpretation that it includes spirit and body both. Human cloning is one small step in that direction."

To follow through with his statement, he's going to clone a human being—himself. His stated intent is to help infertile couples. His real intent is to meet his God.

In January of 1998, Mr. Seed publicly announced that he was opening up a clinic to help infertile couples have children, according to Wired Magazine. He volunteered himself and his wife, whom he described as "post-menopausal," to shepherd the first cloned being to the world. The procedure would entail the combination of the nucleus of one of his cells and a donor egg. His wife would carry the resulting embryo. He's already received thousands of requests from couples and parents, including requests to clone their dying children.

Though there have been laws passed in California and Michigan banning human cloning, Mr. Seed's hometown of Chicago hasn't politically opposed his actions yet.

Perhaps you're wondering if conventional ethics bother Mr. Seed. Well, that depends on your definition of conventional. For him, animal experimentation is nothing more than a scientific procedure. For him, human experimentation is the next logical step.

"It's currently forbidden to use federal money to do human-embryo research; embryos are essential for this work. We'd like to fund it ourselves. But this type of experiment is so dramatic that the prohibition must be lifted for the kind of experiment I just described. It won't do any good to do these experiments on monkeys. You have to do them in humans."

He certainly has guts saying this in a public forum. Mr. Seed is bound to attract the religious right, as well as countless other activists (pro-life, animal rights, etc). And to top it all, he touts religion itself as his purpose for carrying out these experiments.

"I'm not saying I have any instructions from God to do this, but I am saying that it's the nature of Protestant thinking. People are dying every day, and they need sympathy. This is the pastor's role. But in the Protestant era, when anyone could read the Bible and think about it, Christians were able to read and think for themselves, without anyone between them and their idea of God.

When we attain an extended life span and access to unlimited knowledge, we will become God-like. And that is God's intention."

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What do you think about human cloning?