As I wrote last week, Florida, not to mention the United States, is full of surprises. Many practising Christians show a marked lack of opposition to scientific advances that cause hysteria in Britain. One of these is cloning. Expressing my distaste for recreating human beings I used the specious argument that, surely, for the religious, God was meant to create man, so was it not wrong for the latter to usurp that role? This met with the response that God created man in His own image and cloning was simply creating more human beings in His own image.
I was also enlightened during conversations with some of the matriarchs of the Gulf coast as to their positive views on the use of such techniques as DNA testing. Personally, however, I refused to shift ground on this one. I am beginning to regard DNA as both a curse and a killjoy. A curse, because of the recent alleged plot to steal Prince Harry’s hair and compare it with James Hewitt’s, and a killjoy from a romantic point of view.
Where, after all, would the past be without its mysteries? Did the Dauphin, Louis Charles, heir to Louis XVI, die in the Temple prison in Paris, or was another boy substituted in his place? Did the Tsar’s youngest daughter, Anastasia, escape the Bolshevik firing squad? Were the skeletons found hidden in the Tower really those of Edward IV’s sons?
Revolutionary officials insisted that the dauphin had died in prison at the age of ten in 1795. But, according to a new book by Deborah Cadbury, the doctor who performed the autopsy, Jean Petellan, found that he had never seen a brain and legs so well developed in a child of that age.
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