“Cloning is so foreign to me, I can’t imagine it ever happening,” Kathy Kyser said.

Bill Swartz could imagine it, but had this warning: “I would be pretty cautious about human cloning until we understood a little more about cloning in other organisms.”

“I’m not too much in favor of it,” Lore Rosenthal said. “A lot of problems on earth are because we’re not listening to the natural heartbeat of the earth.”

While hanging out at the New Deal Café last Sunday night, they and other patrons kicked back and shared their thoughts on cloning. How did the topic come up? Well, that was my idea. Maybe I was thinking about it because of last year’s European food fights over eating products derived from clones’ offspring. Or maybe it was because of the recent resurrection of 43,000-year-old woolly mammoth blood via DNA cloning.

It was more likely due to the calendar — with 2012 looming ominously in our path, setting the stage for all things sci-fi-ific.

“As a species we’re allowed to play Vulcan, but we’re not allowed to play God,” Michael said, sitting on a couch in the New Deal’s front room. He explained he was referring to Vulcan in the Greco-Roman sense of developing raw materials.

Susan Barnett talked about it in reference to animals. “I’m against cloning of animals. It’s causing a lot of suffering, and there’s not a good reason to do it.” Her words brought me back in time to February 1997.

I remembered opening the paper and being jolted by the announcement that Scotland’s Dr. Ian Wilmut had cloned “Dolly” from the udder cell of a six-year-old sheep. I felt tectonic plates moving on a fault line that set the days before her and those that came after — forever apart.

I wondered how long it would take before scientists would create human clones from adult cells. The answer came in 2001, when Advanced Cell Technology in Massachusetts cloned human embryos. They developed up to the six-cell stage.

Then in 2008, in California, Samuel Wood and Andrew French, developed five human embryos, this time from adult skin cells that reached the blastocyst stage. They may or may not have been able to survive had they been implanted into a womb.

Though we are progressing toward human cloning, many scientists and humanitarians are calling for postponement in view of the dangers brought to light through animal experimentation.

Even Dolly became a virtual senior by 5, wracked with arthritis and lung disease, afflictions generally associated with sheep nearly twice her age. By 6, she was euthanized.

In the annals of cloning, Dolly was soon joined by cows, mice, cats, horses, pigs, monkeys, rabbits, buffalo, wolf, goats and dogs, among others. The majority of them didn’t survive, and those that lived through to birth often suffered afflictions and died young.

Among the strangest of afflictions is sudden and grotesque obesity when some reach adulthood — and this despite eating the same diet as their non-cloned, slimmer contemporaries. They have also had damaged immune systems to contend with, extensive liver damage, cancer and premature aging.

In the repertoire of the odd are the experiments with hybrids. In cloning, not all the genetic material comes from the cell donor, a small dose comes from the mitochondria in the egg. So what is birthed when a cell from a man's leg is crossed with a cow egg? What happens when ancient woolly mammoth DNA is crossed with an elephant egg?

Not just fiction. The woolly mammoth possibilities are being tossed about. And in the face of scarce human egg donations, the human-bovine experiment has been tried, experiencing limited results.

Considering that the cells providing the genetic material, in this case human, are also receiving some genetic material from the cow eggs — ultimate success could achieve strange results.

In 2001, a cross-species clone was actually born from the DNA in the skin cell of an endangered Asian guar that was implanted in a cow egg, although it died in 48 hours from dysentery.

On the theological front, with regards to whether a human clone has a soul — should he or she be part cow, the answer would be harder to come by.

Fellow Greenbelters in the New Deal had some thoughts of their own on the ethical questions.

“If we do cloning of a human being there’s not going to be a soul,” Kathy Kaiser warned, standing firmly against human cloning.

On the flip side, Paul Downs said, “I don’t think it’s immoral." Although he felt it was more important to focus on existing children in need of adoptive families than on how to create more.

As for me, I’m still torn, as I often am when scientific breakthroughs break. In themselves, they may not be an evil, it’s what we non-cloned humans tend to do with power that frightens me.

Among the comments being tossed about at the New Deal, I think Michael may have summed it up best, “It’s like giving a small child power tools.”