What if we could make a person?  Although the science of genome and cloning may well be on the verge of doing just this, and despite that many of us can now, if we are willing to spend enough money, come very close to deciding which genes we would like for our children to have, to date no one--at least as far as we know--has cloned or manufactured a human being.
     A few people, people like Mary Shelley in her novel Frankenstein, or Aldous Huxley in his book Brave New World, have dared imagine what the world might be like if we could indeed make a human being.  A movie I saw recently, Ruby Sparks, though I doubt it was intended as a commentary on this issue, made me think anew about it.  The movie is about a young and lonely and successful novelist who dreams of a woman, Ruby, then proceeds to write a novel about her.  One day, to his surprise, he walks into his apartment and who should he see but Ruby!  The woman about whom he had dreamed had suddenly come to life, behaving exactly as he had described her in his nascent manuscript.  He of course is very happy:  she loves him totally and without reserve.
     Eventually, however, he sees that Ruby is beginning to wander, to explore the world outside his.  After fretting about this, he realizes that by returning to the novel and adding new information about Ruby, he can make her be or do precisely as he pleases.  Soon, Ruby is caught in the crossfires of the lonely and frustrated novelist's life vision, a parody of what a human with choice making capacities should be.  She is no longer her own person.
     Like Frankenstein in Frankenstein, like the rulers of the Brave New World, like every other person who has attempted to make a human being, the lonely novelist stumbles into the fundamental crux of humanness.  Whenever we try to make a person be whom we want this person to be, this person ceases to be the person we ought to most want her to be.  People without choices are not people at all.
     The philosopher Frederick Nietzsche may have gotten many things wrong, but he was right on one thing.  It is our will that defines the essence of what it means to live as a human being.  God made us, yes, but he made us with the will and capacity to "make" ourselves.  God understands that if we cannot exercise our will, we are no longer human beings.
     We live, and die, with astounding liberty.