Cloning given the ethical questions and the good sense 

 
The cell cloning of a human embryo, as soon as this subject was raised, began a new series of discussions in which the central topic concerns ethics and the limits of Science. At that point, it was not discussed whether human cloning was possible or not, since the experience with the sheep Dolly showed that we were far from the day when animal reproduction depended on the fleshly conjunction or the fertilization processes involving male and female gametes.

The controversies about human cloning were beyond that and, curiously, they did not come only from religious groups. Renowned scientists, like the geneticist Newton Freire Maia from the Paraná state in Brazil, manifested his opinion against that experience, even if it was aiming organ transplants. “Science is not supposed to do everything that it knows how to do”, said the professor Freire Maia to the newspaper Gazeta do Povo, a few days before disincarnating. “It is not possible to start creating a person (the embryo) and kill it right after”.

The point made by the departed geneticist is incontestably the key. Needed is to understand that there is something else in a human being, more than just human cells, which is the theme studied by Gabriel Delanne in his book “A evolução anímica”. The vital force itself, says Delanne, is not sufficient to explain the distinctive form of the individuals. Thus, this implies the existence of what Spiritism denominates perispirit, that is, an organ which contains the organogenic laws responsible for maintaining the organism fixity, despite the constant molecular mutations.

The spirits keep their human shape not only because they present themselves typically in such a way, but also because their spiritual body or perispirit constitutes a comprehensive fluidic-model organism by which the matter is organized.  

During the formation of a living creature, life does not provide anything else than the protoplasm matter as a contingent, amorphous matter, in which is impossible to distinguish a minimum organization rudiment. The primitive cell is completely identical within all vertebrates. Therefore, it is undeniable the intervention of a new factor that determines the constructive conditions of the vital structure.

According to Delanne, the perispirit contains the primary design, the law which will work as an inflexible guidance to the new organism and will define its place in the morphologic grade. It is inside the embryo that this directive action is performed. During the embryo development, as observed by Claude Bernard, it is possible to see a simple draft, preceding any organization. No tissue is distinguishable. The whole mass is formed by embryonic and plasmatic cells, but within this project “the ideal design of a still invisible organism is made”.

Thus, it is understandable that without the biological organizer model or perispirit – which provides the vital design mentioned by Claude Bernard – no fetal development would happen.

The perispirit is, according to the Spiritist teachings, the same spiritual body mentioned by Paulo de Tarso in his letter to the Corinthians. It is a soul revetment, belongs to the soul, which means that a true human being life implies the soul presence, reinforcing the lucid idea against the embryo cloning, defended not only by religious people but also by scientists as renowned as the departed geneticist, who passed away on May 10th 2003, suffering from cancer.