TODAY'S AFFRONT, TOMORROW'S PRIZE BY DANIEL J. KEVLES.

IN ``Songs of Innocence,'' William Blake asked, ``Little lamb, who made thee?''

The answer for Dolly the sheep is Dr. Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh.

Dolly, as the world now knows, is a clone, a duplicate of one genetic parent. Her birth marks a milestone in our ability to engineer animals for food and medicine.

It also signals that humans can, in principle, be cloned, too. That prospect troubles many people, but they ought not be too concerned about it at the moment.

Dolly has provoked widespread ethical foreboding. The Church of Scotland suggested that cloning animals runs contrary to God's biodiversity. Wilmut himself said that cloning humans would be ``ethically unacceptable.''

Carl Feldbaum, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, urged that human cloning be prohibited in the United States. (President Clinton asked a federal bioethics commission for a speedy review of the implications of mammalian cloning.)

The outcry over Dolly calls to mind the great biologist J.B.S. Haldane's ``Daedalus,'' a slim book of reproductive utopianism published in 1924. Haldane held that Daedalus of Greek mythology was the first biological inventor (the first genetic engineer, we would say) because he was connected with the procreation of the Minotaur through the coupling of Pasiphae and the Cretan bull.

Daedalus escaped punishment from the gods for his hubris, Haldane noted, but he suffered ``the agelong reprobation of a humanity to whom biological inventions are abhorrent.''

If Daedalus did not offend the gods of his day, many people have indicted biotechnologists for affronting God in ours. Yet Haldane, for one, knew that although biological innovations are often initially seen as perversions, over time, they become accepted as ``a ritual supported by unquestioned beliefs and prejudices.''

As technologies improve, people recognize them as advantageous. Society, through its legislatures and courts, figures out how to resolve the problems they posed at the outset.

In this way, artificial insemination of humans, considered tantamount to adultery before World War II, has become widely accepted. So have reproductive methods like in vitro fertilization and surrogate motherhood. People abort fetuses with genetic disorders, administer growth hormones to smallish children and use insulin made by bacteria injected with a human gene.

Scientists have long speculated about manipulating genes to produce new Einsteins, Heifetzes and Hemingways. Now impresarios can dream of cloning Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and raising their own Dream Team.

The fantasies are endless, but they are just fantasies. People are the products not only of their genes but of their environments. Today an Einstein clone might grow up to be Steven Spielberg. Anyway, no one knows what genes contribute to the qualities we most admire and value, whether virtuosity of the pen, the pitch or the piccolo.

Still, Dolly heralds wondrous innovations with huge economic implications (that Wilmut held back the news of Dolly's birth until he could register a patent has been reported without comment).

Someday an infertile couple might choose to have a child by cloning one or the other partner. A cancer victim might use his DNA to clone spare body parts - liver, pancreas, lungs, kidneys, bone marrow.

For now, cloning should rightly be confined to animals. But as the technology evolves to invite human experimentation, it would be better to watch and regulate rather than prohibit. Outlaw the exploration of human cloning and it will surely go offshore, only to turn into bootleg science that will find its way back to our borders simply because people want it.

As with so many previous advances in biology, today's affront to the gods may be tomorrow's highly regarded - and highly demanded - agent of self-gratification or health.

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