The methods and morals of cloning took center stage at MIT this weekend, as over 1,000 students, faculty and community members convened for a conference hosted in part by Harvard's Hippocratic Society.

The conference, titled "Genetic Technology and Society," was hosted jointly by MIT and Harvard and featured as its keynote speaker the scientists who set off the recent cloning controversy by creating Dolly the sheep.

U.S Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-Wis.) spoke on the legality of cloning. Sensenbrenner is chair of the House Science Committee and a member of the House Judiciary Committee.

He said one of the government's main concerns with cloning was safety, not morality.

"[Cloning is] immoral only because it is currently--and I stress currently--unsafe," Sensenbrenner said.

Sensenbrenner spoke about government funding for scientific research, mentioning last year's 9.7 percent increase in scientific support.

"Certainly our scientific endeavors deserve better," Sensenbrenner said.

Further practical considerations were presented on Saturday by Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, D.C. Rifkin presented concerns of the impact of genetics.

"What does it mean to grow up in a world where you're customized at conception and discriminated favorably or unfavorably in your lifetime based on your genotype?" he said.

"Your generation and your children's generation will see gene wars," he added.

The moral dilemmas posed by cloning then took center stage with.

Park Street Church Associate Minister Rev. Daniel Harrell.

"What we beget is like ourselves while what we make is not," Harrell said. "By virtue of their having been made, [genetically engineered or cloned offspring] would be less than human as we are less than God by our virtue of being made, and not begotten, by God."

Yesterday, Ian Wilmut, a Scottish professor and the researcher, who cloned Dolly, gave the most enigmatic presentation. Wilmut said cloning holds many benefits for science but that human replication could pose a host of problems.

Wilmut cloned "Dolly," a Finn Dorset lamb named after Dolly Parton, in 1996. The original cell was taken from a mammary gland.