VATICAN - “...will we soon be dominated by a new race built in a laboratory? Who will be father and mother, I? You? And tomorrow who will be our parents?” These questions posed by professor Edmund Pellegrino, former President of Catholic Universities in America recently on Italian television, are answered for Fides by Bishop Elio Sgreccia, vice President della Pontifical Academy for Life: “The being is the border for man to remain human and the principle of humanity to remain integral, indeed to be promoted by all ”

Vatican City (Fides Service) - “The advent of the Neolithic era in the history of humanity led man out of the caves and set him to conquer the world; man became a shepherd and a farmer, he learned to work metal and build towns, he invented the wheel starting the acceleration of movement and time; he invented trade by land and sea making use of money, he made great civilisations flourish in the Far East, in Asia and in Latin America.
After the farming era there came the industrial era which gave man more dominion over cosmic nature with the invention of the engine, from the steam engine to supersonic aircraft. Towns first populated with farmers were surrounded with industries. At the height of this era there was the discovery of nuclear power and man took possession of this new energy innate to matter. The risks run on this long journey are known because the invention of writing during the pastoral and farming era made it possible to set memories on stone, parchment, paper and press, but a red furrow of wars and massacres ever more atrocious accompanied man’s steps into secrets of the cosmos because the dominion of the cosmos has not always respected the dignity of the human being.
Now with biological technology we have man’s dominion over life, its secrets, its origin, even there where the life of a new human being starts its organic path with conception in the meeting of love between mother and father.
Where is the border for man to remain human and the principle of humanity to remain integral, indeed is promoted by all? The border is the “being”, the essence of man; please God they will not meddle with the being! There must be respect for the being of the child, the being of the mother, the of being the father.
The threat exists and it is up to our epoch to warn about the danger and prevent it. Being a child means being a gift of God’s love through the love of the parents. The generation of a child implicates, to be truly human, that the wife becomes a mother through gift of self to her husband and the husband becomes a father through gift of self to his wife.
In this conjugation life is sealed in love and God’s gift becomes visible in the human person as the Pope recently recalled when he addressed the Academy (Address to Pontifical Academy for Life 21 February 2004).
The intervention of technological reproduction threatens the being of the person and is, to quote a philosopher Possenti, an act which “un-creates”.
Human freedom, separated from responsibility for the human being and human nature, become Titanism and manifestation of excessive power. This bio-technological era must be reminded of the horizon of moral respect for nature and the human being, and that the goal of science and technology is to offer support and assistance to the human being, in each and every man and woman”. (16/7/2004 Agenzia Fides; Righe:44; Parole:560)