That's not good enough for the Times. They're unhappy with anything short of regulations that allow therapeutic cloning, as endorsed in NJ and CA. Of course, the Times won't even use the term "therapeutic cloning," which is a euphemism to begin with: all cloning works the same way, it's just the use of the end product that matters. Advocates of cloning for stem cells use the term "therapeutic cloning" to differentiate it from "reproductive cloning," a la Dolly the sheep. Reproductive cloning is supposedly creepy and unnatural, but who could be against therapy?
I think the reverse is true. Reproductive cloning, at least, produces a human being, with a chance to live his or her own life. We don't find identical twins unnatural, and ideally a clone would be no more so, typically being a different age from the donor anyway.
Reproductive cloning is also well-understood, thanks to a media fixation on the aforementioned Dolly and decades of science fiction.
Therapeutic cloning, on the other hand, is often just packed in with the stem cell debate. Media coverage focuses on the politics of the issue, with perhaps an abstract discussion of the technique:
The person who needed the healthy stem cells would provide a non-egg, non-sperm cell from which the DNA would be removed. That DNA, containing two copies of each human chromosome, would be inserted into a donor egg that has had its own nucleus and DNA removed. The egg with the introduced DNA would act like it had just been fertilized and begin to divide, forming an embryo. Stem cells from that embryo would be removed and cultured to provide the needed healthy tissue.I think there are some extremely troubling implications here that I've never seen teased out in mainstream reporting. Because you're providing your own DNA, the embryo being created is a genetic duplicate of you! That is, if it were implanted into a mother and came to term, it would be your clone. Not to put too fine a point on it, this technique involves destroying an embryo that is identicalto you at that stage of your development. Now, perhaps that doesn't bother you, the embryo is indeed "just a clump of cells" as the Times puts it. I think, though, that it would bother many people on all sides of the debate. For all the reporting on this issue, it's remarkable that this consequence isn't common knowledge, as it surely must be to the scientists and researchers who are always wringing their hands about falling behind in crucial, life-saving research. It's a great moral question that ties in questions of identity, medicine, morality and The Clonus Horror. I guess it's just easier to frame the issue as luddite Christian fundamentalists vs. brave pioneering scientists, which is too bad.
Another issue worth pondering: Assume therapeutic cloning is deemed morally and socially acceptable, and proves wildly successful at treating a variety of diseases. As the description above indicates, to make it work you need a donor egg. Eggs are not exactly easy to come by: each female of the species is born with only so many. Given their rarity, and the cost involved in extracting them, could we see a sellers' market in human eggs? If they really do provide miracle cures, wouldn't their market price end up at least in the vicinity of a few thousand dollars? You could make a pretty good living, then, just dispensing eggs. I suppose there would be a serious incentive to develop an artificial egg, but until then an ovary could be an ATM. I have no idea what to think about that.
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