CLONING IS NOT DEAD–SINCE AFTER 1997 DOLLY THE SHEEP CLONED–THE DRIVE TO DO HUMAN REPRODUCTION CLONING IS ALIVE AND PROCEEDING FORWARD UNHINDERED LURKING IN THE BACKDROP OF THE FRANKENSTIEN OF SCIENCE THAT HUMANS CAN CREATE BETTER HUMANS JUST LIKE G*D IN THE WEAK MINDS OF THE HUMAN FRAILTY

Have you ever wondered what happened to cloning? Twenty years ago, when Dolly the sheep was still bleating, cloning was seen as the most important topic in bioethics. But over the last few years it dropped off the radar. One of our favorite journals, the New Atlantis (which is published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center), released an unsettling new report last week that sheds a great deal of light on where cloning has gone under the cover of night.

It turns out that cloning has not been put to bed as an ethical problem. If anything, the challenges it presents to human dignity have worsened dramatically:

When the world learned in 1997 of Dolly the sheep, the first clone produced from an adult mammal, a broad public discussion about the ethics of human cloning ensued, largely focused on the nature, meaning, and future of human procreation. However, following the successful derivation of human embryonic stem cells in 1998, the debate over human cloning largely shifted to the question of whether it is acceptable for scientists to create human embryos only to destroy them. The subsequent discovery of promising alternative techniques for generating stem cells without creating or destroying embryos seemed to show that scientific progress would obviate the demand for cloning. But cloning research continued, and American scientists announced in 2013 that they had for the first time successfully obtained stem cells from cloned human embryos.

The New Atlantis report goes on to explain the dangers this macabre research holds for society:

[I]t turns human reproduction into a manufacturing process in the most literal sense: human embryos are created to serve as raw materials for the production of biomedical research supplies. This kind of cloning is today being performed at several scientific labs in the United States, despite the availability of alternative techniques that produce cells of nearly the same scientific and medical value but that require neither the creation nor destruction of human embryos. Cloning-for-biomedical-research also endangers the health and safety of the women called on to undergo dangerous hormone treatments to serve as egg donors. If research cloning is not stopped now, we face the prospect of the mass farming of human embryos and fetuses, and the transformation of the noble enterprise of biomedical research into a grotesque system of exploitation and death.

But if you can believe it, that’s not the worst part of the report. It turns out that much of the new cloning technology is aimed at eventually using cloning for
human reproduction:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/coming-clones_1028493.html