Since the invention of recombinant-DNA techniques in the 1970s, the development of modern biotechnology has presented a constant challenge to our views of ourselves as natural and moral beings. Somatic cell therapies, which cure diseases only in those individuals who are actually being treated, are the least problematic form of medical genetics, as they can easily be seen as no more than a new method of doing what physicians have always done in their professional capacity, namely removing illness and relieving suffering. Germ-line gene therapy, which is expected to rectify hereditary disorders both in patients themselves and in their descendants, has been viewed with more suspicion, because more permanent changes in the human constitution over generations are involved. The project to map the human genome has also caused concern, mainly since it can be applied to eugenic purposes — for the alleged improvement of humankind. But for the last two decades the most serious moral doubts about genetics have been related to cloning or, to be more precise, to the production of children by copying the genetic makeup of living individuals.