BioCentury
ARTICLE | Politics, Policy & Law

Cloning goes high brow

July 3, 2000 7:00 AM UTC

OXFORD - Cloning is about to move, literally, to center stage - not as part of any ethical or philosphical debate, but as the plot of Parthenogenesis, a new opera created by British composer James MacMillan, the poet Michael Symmons Roberts, and Rowan Williams, the Anglican Archbishop of Wales.

The story focuses on the experience of a young woman who was thrown to the ground on the streets of Hanover, Germany, during an Allied bombing raid in 1944. Nine months later she gives birth to a baby girl with identical fingerprints, blood type and other indicators to her mother. The young woman adamantly maintains that she is a virgin, while the examining doctors hypothesize that the shock of the bomb may have jarred a dormant cell within the woman's womb, triggering parthenogenesis...