ONE year ago, an obscure Scottish veterinarian named Ian Wilmut demonstrated how to make mammals, and by implication humans, in a laboratory without any act of sexual congress, indeed without sperm or an (intact) egg. Through cloning, a near-perfect genetic replica of a person could be grown from a single cell of skin, or, say, of rib. In the year since, cloning technology has developed rapidly. Experiments on cattle have refined the technique, and chimpanzee embryos have been successfully cloned. The possibility of human cloning now looms imminently, unseen but real.

When the cloned sheep, Dolly, first hit the newspapers, nearly 90 per cent of Americans found human cloning morally repugnant, according to every poll. Perhaps no other moral issue in American history has produced such near unanimity -- not slavery, not Prohibition, not abortion. But politicians have been reluctant to cement this consensus into federal law.

A bill recently introduced in the Senate by Christopher Bond (R., Mo.) would have outlawed human cloning under a penalty of up to ten years in prison. It lost under a hail of criticism from medical groups, and even some conservative Republicans, that it would be an unnecessary impediment to scientific research. This is a seductive argument, especially when cancer victims like Sen. Connie Mack (R., Fla.) make it.

But the talk of concrete material benefits from cloning assumes that if it is permissible to reproduce certain cells for certain purposes (e.g., to reproduce a burn victim's remaining healthy skin cells to produce a graft), it is permissible to reproduce human beings in a Petrie dish.

Humans are embodied beings, our souls and physical selves are profoundly intertwined. Cloning would take the humanity out of human reproduction, and in so doing rob our spirits of something that cannot be replaced artificially. Furthermore, the manufacture of human beings on demand without conception would turn people into made-to-order goods, and would in aggregate debase our respect for human life.

Most advocates of cloning ignore the moral arguments and tempt us with small concrete benefits. These potential benefits -- many of which, such as a cure for cancer, seem sheer fantasy -- play on our current notions of rights and our culture of compassion in a way that gives them considerable political force. But these arguments constitute an end-run around the central issues. They do not sustain scrutiny.

There is little disagreement about the profound effects the cloning of human beings would have on human nature. However, some cloning apologists simply respond, ``So what?'' For example, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe sees flaws in ``a society that bans acts of human creation for no better reason than that their particular form defies nature and tradition.'' Princeton molecular biologist Lee Silver makes a stronger case than many critics do, that cloning would completely redefine human life, but embraces this outcome as a way for us to take control of our destiny as a species and reshape it as we see fit.

We hear most often that cloning could provide perfectly compatible body parts for persons who need them or that it could enable infertile couples and homosexuals to have ``biological'' offspring. It it hard to say without sounding callous, but death and bodily infirmity are concomitant with human existence and in the long run unavoidable. We live in a society where longevity is becoming a value in itself, but longevity cannot justify a practice that is basically wrong.

As for infertility, it is not even a disabling sickness that, on humanitarian grounds, we should feel obliged to alleviate. It is simply a limitation, on the order of not being tall or wealthy. There is nothing heartless about saying that people should resort to alternatives besides cloning, like adoption. As for those whose arguments are informed by the belief that people have a right to make use of whatever new technologies become available, even Laurence Tribe concedes that there can be no such general right.

When defenders of cloning talk about the brave new world of medical techniques they skip over the fact that its most wondrous manufactures would be Calibans. Consider the likeliest way in which cloning can be used to help with illness: through the creation of perfectly compatible organs for transplantation. It is important here to remember what cloning entails: the DNA-laden nucleus from a somatic (body) cell is placed into a denucleated egg and stimulated into growth with an electric shock. What begins to grow is a ``fertilized'' egg, an embryo -- not a kidney or any other disembodied piece of tissue.

Charles Krauthammer recently wrote about experiments at the University of Texas in which headless mice were created, and raised the specter of headless humans used as organ factories: ``there is no grosser corruption of biotechnology than creating a human mutant and disemboweling it for spare parts.'' Actually, there is perhaps one grosser corruption, for the ``headless human'' scenario is still a science fiction nightmare: it is much easier to delete mouse genes (preventing the head from growing) than human genes. In the meantime, cloned organs would probably have to develop within human fetuses, which would be aborted when the organs were ready.

This is called ``organ farming'': growing human life as material. Advocates of cloning like to sidestep the idea of organ farming with visions of growing organs, not a fetus. Such techniques, while theoretically possible, are entirely speculative. There is no reason to believe they will ever be perfected. And, in any case, work with higher-order animals (not banned in any of the bills) would allow such research to continue.

The infertility applications of cloning have nightmares of their own. Consider: a woman wants ``biological'' children, but her ovaries do not work because of age or other reasons. She clones herself. The fetus will be female, and have inside her ovaries a lifetime supply of eggs, exactly identical to the woman's own eggs. The fetus is then aborted and the eggs harvested for implantation in the woman. This is an option actually entertained by some fertility doctors, who say they already see a market for it; cloning defenders like Professor Silver celebrate this as a marvelous extension of a woman's reproductive capabilities.

The fact that people are already inventing -- and endorsing -- such scenarios demonstrates the corrosive magic this technology works on the notion of human dignity. Indeed, it is not just the horrific applications but cloning itself that are abominations. For human beings are unavoidably defined by our biological, embodied natures. How we come into being is not trivial: it is central to who we are. This is one of the reasons why incest, even consensual incest -- which like cloning, has no ``victims'' -- offends us to our core. It blurs the lines of kinship: the begotten couples with her begetter.

AND if incest crosses the boundaries defined by the human way of coming into being, cloning twists and breaks them. Parents and children would be replaced with ``donors'' and ``clones.'' The relationship between the parties to asexual reproduction would be inherently ambiguous (the species which currently practice it, amoebas and the like, show zero interest in their relatives). But that relationship surely would be affected by the fact that cloning constitutes the manufacture of humans as made-to-order goods. The danger is that if people are made and not begotten, they become like everything else which is but a tool: a means, not an end.

Some writers, like Harvard biology professor Richard Lewontin, say all the furor is over nothing. Clones are no different from twins, they say, so what's the big deal? Well, what was the last pair of twins heard of born fifty years apart to two different women? What woman who gives birth to a handsome child can go to a doctor and request another genetically identical one, or maybe a dozen? The real moral issue is not the genetic make-up of clones, but the method of their manufacture. It is asexual reproduction that robs a cloned child of parents, not the fact the someone else shares his genotype.

Some people, of course, have no patience for arguments about morality and justice, and care only about ruddy, healthy human beings. But even they should reject cloning. In individual cases, cloning may benefit some, but it will be a very selfish advance because in the long run it undermines the advancement of the human species. There is good reason that all higher life forms are reproduced through random combinations of two mates' DNA. The constant changes in genotype create the variety necessary for the species to respond to environmental changes. Since the environment is constantly changing, failure to vary the genotype creates genetic stagnation that can be catastrophic.

We've become accustomed to revolutionary technologies emerging daily, from microchips to surgical lasers. But even the most advanced technologies merely facilitate or improve upon normal human functions. While cloning may look just like a particularly impressive piece of laboratory wizardry, actually it redefines the parameters of human life. Such breakthroughs do not happen every day.

However, one thing we can say about cloning is that it is an entirely new transgression. Unfortunately, since Eve was beguiled by the serpent, mankind has never been good at understanding sin without experiencing it.

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