Re-ontologizing life: from the Da Vince Code to the Genetic Code

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Cloning is not a new dream or nightmare, witness the fiction thriller novel by Ira Levin (1976) turned into a famous film with the same title, "The Boys from Brazil", directed by Franklin J. Schaffner (1978). But it is no longer a sci-fi speculation either. Dolly was born 10 years ago (5th of July, 1996), and the world has never been the same since.
Despite some wacky claims, there are no cloned humans around, apparently, but this possibility will never be locked inside Pandora's box again. Will there be human cloning in the future (e.g. in a thousand years)? The answer can only be yes. The question is whether it will be legal. Compare what has happen to nuclear weapons. Legislation and international pressure has had only some limited success, in terms of control of their proliferation. Likewise, it would be unrealistic to think that humanity will stop at either technical difficulties or moral boundaries. Our best hopes is that we might be able to limit the damage.
Personally, I see nothing wrong in "playing God", my deep concerns are moral, but go in a different direction.
Any technique needs testing, and testing means failure, a lot of failure. One gets things right only after a long trail of trials and errors. And even when a technique is optimized and well-tuned, there remains plenty of scope for mistakes and the usual, statistical malfunctions.
In some cases, one can place security checks and graduate the processing stages in such a way that it is possible, if a mistake is unfixable, to abort the whole process.
In some other cases, one simply does not care if a low percentage (acceptably "low" in terms of financial convenience) of the end products are to be thrown away.
The latter option seems to be the one adopted in the case of animal cloning. Since fixing the creation of a living organism on the fly is, at this stage of our knowledge, undoable, we may just rely on a mass production of, say, rats, and then kill or let die all those that are unhealthy. Is this nice? No. Could a case be made for it? Maybe, depending on what might be at stake (suppose thousands of cloned rats had to be sacrificed in order to discover how to treat AIDS). Could this be an option with humans? Technically, yes. Morally, it should not be, of course. Will morality therefore override other interests? I doubt it. History has seen massacres and violences of all sorts. Humans have used, exploited and abused other humans in the most brutal, disgusting ways. Nobody should have any illusions about what humanity will be able and willing to do to itself tomorrow.

A last thought, which may be phrase in a little syllogism:
1) cloning human beings successfully is possible
2) Jesus of Nazareth was a human being
therefore...
Messy isn't it?
Forget about Da Vince Code, is the Genetic Code that matters.

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