Noah is due to be born next month in Iowa. He will be the first representative of an endangered species who is cloned from a cell of a dead ancestor. Noah is an Asian gaur, a hump-backed, ox-like, heavily muscular mammal. Gaurs have been found only in the bamboo jungles of India and Myanmar. Today only a few of them are left and without interference of science their total extinction would be only a question of some years. Noah's mother is a cow with the name Bessie. Scientists in Massachusetts cloned the endangered animal from a single skin cell taken from a dead gaur and fused with a cow's egg whose own genes had been removed, then transferred it to the womb of the cow Bessie. This is the first endangered species ever to be cloned, and the first cloned animal to gestate in a womb of another species.

The scientists who created Noah are laying plans to clone the endangered Giant Panda. Cells of the Giant Pandas Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, who died in 1992 and 1999 in the Washington National Zoo, are kept frozen in liquid nitrogen, waiting to make history. Attempts to recreate bucardo, an extinct Spanish mountain goat, will begin in a few weeks. A falling tree in the Ordesa National Park in Aragon killed the last known bucardo last January, but some of its cells are preserved. An emptied egg from another species will be "re-programmed" and the recreated bucardo embryo is planned to be implanted in a surrogate mother. If scientists successfully clone bucardo through this process, they will accomplish world's first "resurrection".

This is a great moment in the history of science and a turning point in the natural history of our planet. Due to rapid changes of environment, in some cases to exploitative human behavior, one by one hundreds of animal species have been vanishing in recent times and the immense variety of flora and fauna was slowly melting down. Now this process can be stopped and even reversed. Science has found a way to rescue endangered species from extinction and to recreate already extinct ones. The Bengal tiger may have a chance to come back to Indian jungles, the vultures may remain with us –the possibilities are enormous. With the help of science, nature can regain lost riches. It is not so much a question of practical use for humankind. We may well be able to do in future without the Asian gaur, even without the Bengal tiger. It is a question of a special quality of our life that lies in the enrichment of our experience. The opportunity to experience a colorful and diverse nature as part of our day to day life gives us a unique chance of intellectual and emotional growth and is not easily substitutable by anything else. Nature is neither the creation of God nor humans. And it resists attempts to be submitted to religion. To experience, to watch and explore, nature is a powerful antidote against religious thinking.

We have reason to celebrate. Not only the comeback of extinct animals and the prospect of great leaps forward in medical science which may result very soon from the ongoing cloning research. These are examples for the unstoppability of scientific progress that takes its course despite all efforts of religionists to stop it. There have been times where the Christian churches have been in a position to obstruct and restrain scientific developments. They have lost the power to do so.

But let us not forget that every new advancement of human knowledge, each furtherance of our horizon, was questioned and ridiculed by religion. The fear of the wrath of God and the rigid ethical yardsticks which refuse to grow and modify with scientific advancement have been stumbling blocks to progress. When anesthesia was discovered, when X-ray was discovered, when the composition of blood was discovered, when pain killers where developed, they were opposed in the name of religion. Even the dissection of human body was once prohibited by religion. Today they have lost their power. And ironically there are some people who call themselves humanists or even rationalists, who find it very difficult to bear this. We see behind the shrill religious chorus against cloning and other scientific progress a little band emerging which plays exactly the same song without Jesus: they are the "ethical apologists" in our own camp. Let us not allow them to disturb the celebration of scientific progress.

Mexican law is different - up to now at least. Though abortion is generally banned, it is allowed in special circumstances as in cases of rape, potential birth defects and high medical risk for the mother. That is federal law, but some states try to go their own way. In the rural state Guanajuato, Catholic hardliners have recently made a move to change abortion law and punish rape victims with imprisonment if they abort. That has sparked a furious public debate. 90 per cent of Mexico’s population are Catholics, but in the question of abortion after rape the vast majority disagrees with the views of the church, say opinion polls. The initiative for a stricter abortion law is alarming, because it indicates increasing influence of the Catholic church on state affairs. It comes shortly after the deeply Catholic National Action Party has won the presidential elections, defeating the Institutional Revolutionary Party for the first time since 1929. On July 2, Vicente Fox became the first opposition president. There are speculations that his National Action Party may try to erode the strict separation of church and state in Mexico which has existed for one and a half centuries and make Catholicism state religion. The President-elect, who finds himself in the eye of the storm even before taking office on December 1, tries carefully to keep out of the controversy. Guanajuato is Fox’ home state, but he has nothing to do with the initiated change of abortion law, he says. The move of the hardliners was responded by a move in the other direction: the Institutional Revolutionary Party and the Party of Democratic Revolution, which rules Mexico City, have informally agreed to cooperate in easing abortion law in the capital.