ROME — Catholic Church officials said Friday that the recently created first synthetic cell could be a positive development if correctly used, but warned scientists that only God can create life.

Following Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith's lab's complete synthesis of a Mycoplasma mycoides genome and its successful "hijack" of a cell whose DNA had been remove, President Obama contacted Dr. Amy Gutmann, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, on May 20, 2010, to lead a study on the "implications of this scientific milestone" in association with his Science and Technology Adviser, Dr. John P. Holdren.

Ted Peter's book is a key work in understanding the politics and tacit theologies of the the notion of "playing god," how it came to be circulated as a key trope in debates over genetic engineering, and what its limitations are for ethical reflection.

American society is aging‚ dramatically, rapidly, and largely well. More and more people are living healthily into their seventies and eighties, many well into their nineties. With birth rates down, with the baby boomers approaching retirement, we are on the threshold of the first-ever "mass geriatric society." The fastest growing segment of our population is already the group over 85. Historically speaking, it is the best of times to be old.

First, we have sought to clarify and explain the current federal policy regarding stem cell research and to make clear the legal, ethical, and prudential foundations on which the policy rests: the desire to promote important biomedical research without endorsing, funding, or creating incentives for the future destruction of human embryos. We have also sought to describe how that policy is being implemented, especially by the National Institutes of Health.

The President's Council on Bioethics' report on the regulation of biotechnologies and the efficacy of regulating bodies, like the FDA, in doing so

eeking to advance biomedical science while upholding ethical norms, the Council has taken a keen interest in recent suggestions that science itself might provide a way around this ethical dilemma. Accordingly, we have been looking into ways of obtaining pluripotent, genetically stable, and long-lived human stem cells (the functional equivalent of human embryonic stem cells) that do not involve creating, destroying, or harming human embryos.

Increasingly, advances in biomedical science and technology raise profound challenges to familiar human practices and ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. It is no wonder, then, that bioethics touches matters close to the core of our humanity: birth and death, body and mind, sickness and health, freedom and dignity are but a few of these.\r\n\r\nFrom the beginning, human beings have addressed these matters in works of history, philosophy, literature and religious meditation.

The Commission examined the full range of research with human beings sponsored by the Federal government and the private sector. We paid particular attention to the current patchwork of statues and regulations, particularly to the effectiveness of the "Common Rule", the set of protections for human research participants that is followed by 17 federal agencies.\r\n\r\nIn the report, NBAC proposes a new oversight system to ensure the protection of all research participants in a manner that facilitates and encourages ethically sound research.

Man's biotechnological powers are expanding in scope, at what seems an accelerating pace. Many of these powers are double-edged, offering help for human suffering, yet threatening harm to human dignity. Human cloning, we are confident, is but a foretaste -- the herald of many dazzling genetic and reproductive technologies that will raise profound moral questions well into the future.