The dignity and vocation of the human person. A Christian bioethical vision.

T he announcement that the federally funded Human Genome Project had succeeded— ahead of schedule—in mapping the nucleotide sequences of all 23 pairs of chromosomes belonging to five human persons convinces me that we have arrived at the threshold of the Enlightenment project's final frontier. At the core of this modern project, a project not totally unrelated in its genesis to Christian values, is the notion of the intrinsic value of each human person and the subsequent desire to liberate all persons, to free them from the unfulfilling strictures of other persons and even from those limitations that physical nature imposes through the human body. According to the secular version of modernity, the means to this freedom and fulfillment for all are the free economy, the liberal democratic state, and aboveall, the scientific method of sensorv observation A