Read the BBC News story here. Dolly scientists to clone embryos.
Professor Ian Wilmut, of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, wants to use cloned human embryos to study motor neurone disease (MND)...
A noble cause for sure but is it the first step on a slippery slope?
I don't think so and I certainly don't believe that banning this research is the solution. Prohibition has never worked in history what is needed is regulation. What is the nightmare scenario that people fear anyway? So someone clones a human being what we will have is a human which shares the same dna as another human being, but doesn't that happen in nature anyway with identical twins. In fact the clone will be more different to their genetic twin than identical tweins are because the environmental factors which go to create a human will be different.
We won't have clones created for spare parts because those clones will be human and will have the same rights as a human created the natural way and if they don't then taht is a legislative problem not a scientific one.
Will we have clone armies like in Star Wars: The Attack of the Clones? no we won't that is just science fiction.
In addition we cannot at the moment create human clones the science hasn't been developed that far yet, we may never get to that point. We're not even very good at creating clones of animals, the ones we have created have had congenital defects in their organs and have died prematurely.
Labels: Star Wars
