64 Therapeutic Cloning My mind flashed back to a fall day in 1960 when I was seven years old. My mother and I walked along the sidewalk, on our way to the corner store. Suddenly, from above, a red leaf began a slow descent from the top of a tree in front of us. The leaf fell among some bushes alongside the sidewalk and I stopped to pick it up. “Mom, look, a cocoon.” There among the fallen leaves was a gray cocoon, as big as your thumb, woven between the stems of a branch. I snapped it off and on we went to the store. When we got home, my mother propped the cocoon on a ledge near a frosted kitchen window and I forgot about it over the long Michigan winter months. Then one spring day, a miracle happened. My mother and I had just stepped out of the car and my sister came in running, screaming, “Hurry, you gotta see!” Running into the kitchen I stopped at the door in amazement. A spectacular moth sat perched on the windowsill, more colorful, larger, and more wonderful than anything I knew existed – six inches from wing to wing, and painted in deep velvety colors of the rainbow. The miracle of this immortal cycle of metamorphosis – egg, caterpillar, moth and back to egg again – never left this young boy’s mind. THE CYCLE OF LIFE For millennia our ancestors were observant enough to recog- nize the profundity of the cycle of life, and the fact that there is a sense in which life is immortal. While it is true that the individual plant ages and dies, out of the sun-drenched soil of spring a resurrection of plant life occurs every year. And while the individual zebra dies, as far back as anyone can remember there have always been zebras, and they always wear stripes. In other words, there is an immortal substratum of life, a contin- uum that connects the generations – a cycle of life, an immortal