Specter of Cloning May Prove a Mirage
By Stephen S. Hall,
The New York Times
| 02. 17. 2004
A rose is a rose is a rose, even if - like many commercial plants -
it is essentially a clone. But is a normal human blastocyst, a
microscopic bubble of proto-life that forms about five days after sperm
meets egg, the same as a cloned blastocyst?
That
may seem an arcane technical question in the debate about human
cloning, reignited last week with the announcement by South Korean
scientists that they had cloned a human embryo and harvested embryonic
stem cells from it. But scientists, politicians and bioethicists have
been grappling for years with the biological and moral subtleties
encapsulated by that tiny dot of tissue.
The future
of human therapeutic cloning in this country - the laws governing it,
the knowledge to be gained from it, the ethical costs of doing it and
the medicines it might eventually bestow - may hinge on how society
views that question.
In last week's report in the
journal Science, researchers at Seoul National University described how
they had created some 30 cloned human blastocysts in order to harvest
human embryonic stem...
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