I was reading the other day that certain groups are working toward the cloning of human beings.

As I feel rather strongly that this probably isn't a good idea, possibly something that could go wrong to Michael Crichton proportions, I read with great interest.

In case you aren't a fan, Crichton is the fellow who wrote the books about Jurassic Park.

If we look at Crichton's model, in which the blood of dinosaurs long extinct was extracted from mosquitoes buried in amber to reproduce the long dead creatures, it is enough to make you wonder.

Why can't they make more dinosaurs? I am sure that a good variety of dinosaurs could really be useful when it got right down to it. One Brontosaurus could probably devour most of the kudzu in North Carolina and Virginia and carniverous Raptors would make great guard animals. We could re-instate the gladiator penalty for crimes and make capital punishment pay for itself for the first time since the Roman Empire was a world power. Who wouldn't tune in to see a Raptor or a Tyrannosaur devour a few hundred condemned criminals?

Lesser criminals could face less menacing dinosaurs. I like it. Perhaps an even better plan could be watching criminals feeding small town newspaper editors to Pterodactyls while eating grub worms. I would venture a guess that the Survivor television show wouldn't be number one for very long.

As for cloning for other things, it is true that we now have the technology to begin the process. Oddly enough, one of the main groups already working toward the cloning of human beings has an almost comical background.

The group is called Clonaid and is based in Montreal, Canada. They were founded by Rael, the leader of a "religious" organization that claims all life on Earth was founded by extraterrestrial scientists in laboratories.

I can just see those little green men with beakers shaking up the molecules of life to make human beings. Perhaps we were created in a failed attempt to create slimy green, bug-eyed monstrosities.

Then again, perhaps some of us were closer to perfect than others.

The group's leader is a biologist named Brigitte Boisselier. I am not sure, but I think her last name means girdle in French. Of course, I can't say much - mine means "the street".

At any rate, Clonaid claims to have a list of 100 people that want to be cloned. They did not offer any names.

If we can't clone dinosaurs, perhaps we could exhume great men and women from history and see if nature or nurture or divine providence made them who they turned out to be.

How would Mussolini do running a daycare center? Hitler as a fast-food restaurant manager? Atilla the Hun as a store clerk? Fidel Castro running a small cigar stand?

As preposterous as these ideas might sound, there would be nothing to stop someone from re-creating some of these men if they had the right DNA.

Hitler may be lost, along with Atilla, but Mussolini wouldn't be that hard to locate, I don't believe. Fidel is still alive, all we need to do is milk out a little bit of his blood.

How about all of the Egyptian kings we have mummified remains of? Is it possible to raise them from the dead?

I do understand that Frederick Barbarossa was taken to Jerusalem in a pickle barrel during the second crusade. Can you imagine some of these countries raising their dead leaders to rule again after centuries in the grave?

Then I have even more questions. What about George Washington or Abraham Lincoln? Do we want them to be president today?

I don't think we do. History candy-coats a lot of stuff that we just don't want to remember. Thomas Jefferson's infidelities with a slave, Washington riding out to squelch a tax rebellion with the army, Lincoln being such a weak leader that his government split apart beneath him.

It wasn't all candy and roses in those days, either.

The question they can't answer now is whether or not a person would have the same personality as the person he or she was cloned to copy.

I don't think this old world needs two copies of anyone running around. If God had wanted two of them he would have made them twins.

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