Most members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe in God. As explained in Mormon Belief: Spirit Offspring of God, we not only believe in God, but we believe we are literally the spirit offspring of God. We believe that when Jesus taught us to pray to our Heavenly Father via The Lord's Prayer, he was referring to a literal relationship (Matthew 6:9-13). We believe that God created life and placed it on this earth. In Mormon Belief: God Created Life, I quoted verses from Genesis chapter 1 that support this belief.
The general public has long had an interest in the creation of life. The book Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelle, was written in 1818 and published in London. It is probably the most famous story in literature about the creation of life.
Scientists have also been interested in creating life. Cloning has been a successful technique to change the nature of organisms. The history of cloning history goes back to 1952 and continues to the present. The list of animals that have been cloned is long and includes sheep, monkeys, cats, dogs, cattle, deer, goats, horses, rats, mice, and water buffalo.
Cloning raises the question, "Is cloning the creation of life?" I expect that people will probably have differing answers to that question. My view is no. Cloning is only the creation of new life-forms, not of new life itself. Current cloning techniques involve changing the genetic material in an egg such that an embryo from that egg will have the new attributes. No new life has been created through cloning. The egg already had the "spark of life" (what ever that means), and cloning only changes the characteristics of the living organism that results from cloning. In a previous post, I referred to the work of Craig Venter and his group. They created artificial DNA and plan to introduce that DNA into the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium with the hope that the chromosome will take over the bacterium. I agree that they have created an artificial DNA and if successful will have created new forms life that didn't exist before. In effect they will have bypassed the eons of time involved with evolution to create new forms of life. I do not agree that they will have created new life itself since the bacterium to be used in the experiment will already be alive.
In 2002, scientists duplicated the polio virus using laboratory chemicals. They injected the virus into mice to demonstrate the virus was active. The mice became paralyzed and then died. Scientists are divided over the question of viruses being alive. If viruses are alive, the duplication of the polio virus would be a laboratory creation of an existing life-form but would not be new life, i.e. life that didn't already exist.
In order to create new life rather than to just modify or duplicate life, scientists would have to create new life from elementary elements in which the "spark of life" did not already exist. In my book I referred to work at Harvard University, announced in 2003, in which scientists created from basic elements a crude form of a cell. At that time, they did not claim to have created life, only to have created a primitive form of something, a "container", that is necessary for life to exist. However, those scientists are now claiming to be on the verge of creating advanced or workable "containers" for new cells.
In this post, I'm making a distinction between "new life" and "new life-forms". I use the phrase "new life" to refer to new life that hadn't existed in any form. I use the phrase "new life-form" to refer to new "versions" of a particular life-form, i.e. new life-forms that have different characteristics than older "versions" of the same life-form.
