Learn from the mistakes of others

Bioethics Panel Nudges Lawmakers

"President Bush's Council on Bioethics released a report Thursday on reproductive biotechnologies that could finally push the U.S. government to an agreement on human-cloning legislation.

The United States is one of the few developed countries without a law regulating human cloning, mainly because legislators have bound together the two different types of cloning: the kind to create a baby (reproductive cloning), and the kind that scientists want to use to develop stem cells for potential medicines (therapeutic cloning, or cloning for biomedical research).

Conflating the two types of cloning is a problem because while many scientists favor therapeutic cloning, almost everyone agrees that reproductive cloning should be illegal, because the procedure is still experimental in humans.

The council believes it has come up with language in Reproduction and Responsibility: The Regulation of New Biotechnologies to finally separate these conjoined twins. It suggests drafting legislation that limits baby-making to one method: "the union of egg and sperm."

That would exclude reproductive cloning, which does not require an egg and sperm, only a human egg and some cells from the individual to be cloned. In reproductive cloning, the cells are inserted into the egg, zapped with electricity or chemicals to begin cell division, and voila, a clone -- if it works, which it often does not."

goddamn, but politicians can be ornery and dense. how many times do we have to punch this shit into their dense heads before they get it - scientists do have some clue when they start talking about their field of expertise.

it's not as though the federation of american scientists [and others] haven't tried to explain this one a few hundred times.

from the outside, there is the strong impression that certain fundamentalist christian values have more sway than rational, considered judgment.

ah. the free world. it's all taxable anyway.