CGS-authored

What Cloning Has Wrought

Gia Fenoglio
National Journal Magazine

August 4, 2001

"Of one thing, I have no doubt. The growing use of reprogenetics [reproductive biology and genetics] is inevitable. For better and worse, a new age is upon us--an age in which we as humans will gain the ability to change the nature of our species." -- Lee M. Silver, a Princeton University professor of molecular biology and public affairs, in his 1998 book, Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family

Four years after the world said hello to Dolly, the cloned sheep from Scotland, and three years after Silver wrote his provocative book pushing cloning techniques, Congress and interest groups are discovering that a new age has, indeed, arrived. This new age has forced lawmakers to confront issues many of them would just as soon ignore. It's also scrambled interest-group alliances so thoroughly that organizations that otherwise detest one another find themselves working on the same side of the cloning issue.

Consider the debate on the bill that the House passed on Tuesday...