Is the Synthetic Cell about Life? - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences: Does creating life in a lab demystify it? Every time gametes are combined in a test tube to create embryos, life is created. In another sense, this is not “creating life,” it is only “creating a living organism,” which does not amount to the same thing as creating life unless you already believe that life is nothing more than interacting chemicals. If you believe life involves a special spiritual spark, the breath of God, the wisp of vapor that dementors almost sucked out of Sirius Black, well: creating an organism is not necessarily tantamount to creating that. That’s not just life, but Life, and nothing that happens in the lab will tell us much about it.
Consider, in keeping with the title of this new column, a thought experiment: would a person created through cloning have a soul? I submit that if there are such things as souls at all, then people created through cloning have them, too.
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