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Tuesday, 24 June 2008 |
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From Wesley J. Smith, 13 June 2008.
 Cloning reduces procreation to a matter of mere manufacture and transforms human life into an instrumentalized natural resource, whether that life is a nascent cloned embryo created and destroyed for its stem cells or women exploited for their eggs--since an egg is required for each cloning attempt.
One reason the human cloning agenda has stalled is the lack of human eggs. I have been warning that researchers are more than willing to risk the health, fertility--and even the lives--of women to obtain these eggs, and if volunteers won't put themselves at risk, then they will promote an egg commodities market. And now in Nature News, we see that coming to pass. From the story:
US stem-cell researchers are calling for changes to state laws that prohibit compensating women who donate eggs for research. The laws, in leading stem-cell research states such as Massachusetts and California, are crippling the promising field of ‘therapeutic cloning’ that could produce useful embryonic stem-cell lines for studying various human diseases, they say.
And don't think that there will be enough women willing to sell in the USA to fill the veracious hunger cloners have for eggs. Note this:
It took Kevin Eggan and Douglas Melton, of Harvard University's Stem Cell Institute, two years and US $100,000 in local advertising to secure a single egg donor for their attempt to develop embryonic stem-cell lines to model diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The group, which obtained fewer than ten eggs, completed its experiments early this year, Eggan announced last month at a meeting of the Society for the Study of Reproduction in Kona, Hawaii. They are not yet ready to discuss results.
Those prices would put even the profligate California Institute for Regenerative Medicine out of business.
And don't think that current egg market bans are in the least principled. Rather, they are public mollifiers deemed necessary by cloning proponents to permit the Brave New World agenda to get on its feet:
The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) guidelines barring compensation were set in part to protect poor people from being exploited by labs that might offer large sums of money--along the lines of rules barring compensation for organ donation. But Alta Charo, a lawyer and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison, who liaised with the NAS committee that set donor-compensation guidelines in 2005, says the move was as much political as ethical. In California, supporters of Proposition 71, which allows funding for stem-cell and cloning research in the absence of federal funding, adopted compensation prohibition in part, Charo claims, "to assuage a fringe group of the women's movement" that was aligned against the assisted-reproduction community.
In other words, all of those assurances about protecting women are nothing more than temporary expedients that will be swept away as soon as it is deemed politically feasible. And if the assurances made in this area are nothing but cow manure, so too are the equally oleaginous promises to limit the lives of cloned embryos to 14 days, and to never engage in fetal farming, and to never want reproductive cloning. The mendacity of the pro cloning advocates in establishing "self limiting"--but really made to be broken--"ethical" guidelines makes me sick.
Next stop will be the developing world and biological colonialism. We need to not only bar buying and selling eggs for research in this country, but also have international protocols to govern the matter. |
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Loophole in Embryology Bill could allow cloning without new legislation |
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Sunday, 15 June 2008 |
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From The Times
June 14, 2008
A loophole in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill could permit some reproductive cloning without the need for fresh primary legislation, the Government has admitted.
While the update to fertility law maintains the ban on creating cloned babies, it has inadvertently made it much simpler for ministers to overturn it. If a reproductive cloning technique could be shown to be suitable for preventing the birth of children suffering from a rare type of genetic disease, it could be cleared for clinical use without changing the statute book.
Ministers would simply have to issue new regulations that permit this application of cloning. These would then need to be approved by a simple vote of both Houses of Parliament, instead of the laborious primary legislation required at present.
Reproductive cloning involves placing the nucleus of an adult cell into an empty egg, and then implanting the cloned embryo into a woman's womb. Any resulting baby would be genetically identical to the DNA donor. The procedure is banned under the 2001 Reproductive Cloning Act which was introduced because of scientists' fears about safety and widespread ethical concerns. This law will be repealed by the HFE Bill, which contains fresh provisions that prohibit such cloning.
The Department of Health, however, has accepted that the legislation contains a flaw that could in theory make it easier for the ban to be lifted. Dawn Primarolo, the Health Minister, insisted in a debate during the Bill's committee stage that the Government has no intention of using this new power under any circumstances. She added that as new regulations would have to be approved by Parliament, there will still be democratic safeguards against cloning.
Opposition MPs, however, have expressed concern at the watering down of the cloning ban. Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrat science spokesman, said: “There is no prospect of this Parliament, or future Parliaments, passing regulations that would allow human reproductive cloning. But it would clearly be better, for the sake of consistency and reassurance, for the Bill to do what we all thought it would do, which is totally to ban human reproductive cloning in primary legislation.” He said it would be relatively simple for the Government to redraft the Bill to exclude all possibilities.
The problem has arisen because of clauses that regulate a new approach to preventing diseases caused by faulty mitochondria - cellular “batteries” that provide energy. The flaw in the legislation, first highlighted by a small pressure group called Human Genetics Alert, is that not all mitochondrial diseases are caused by defects in mitochondrial DNA. Some are caused by defects in the nucleus.
A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “This power can only be used to permit the practice of curing an embryo or an egg of a serious mitochondrial disease. The Government will not use this power to permit the practice of reproductive cloning.” |
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Thursday, 07 February 2008 |
From the Daily Telegraph,7 Feb 2008
Sir - Professor Doug Turnbull confesses that he and his colleagues "don't... want to wait another three years for the law to change" to allow the birth of "babies with three parents" (report, February 5).
Supporters assure us that this is not really cloning but, at most, a benign form of germ-line genetic engineering.
Unfortunately, cloning is exactly what this is: would-be parents produce an early IVF embryo, whose genetic vital parts are then destructively transferred to another woman's ovum. The resulting clone embryo is a distinct individual, whose relation to the original embryo is something like that of twin to twin.
Far from having three parents, the resulting embryo has only a fraction of a true parent: the donor of a partly empty ovum, who contributes part of what a mother normally provides. The child born will realise that her birth required not just an unknown woman's ovum but the destruction of her own identical twin on her social parents' instructions.
There are suspicions that the slightest push will overcome any Government resistance to this procedure. But there is still time for the Government and all MPs to show their awareness of the risks and harms such techniques involve for those conceived and their descendants.
Dr Helen Watt, Director, Linacre Centre for Healthcare Ethics, London NW8
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Thursday, 31 January 2008 |
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Ian Wilmut's old cloning team is furious, apparently, that he is receiving a knighthood for his "service to science." Their point is that Wilmut did not actually clone Dolly or do anything other than administer the lab in which the groundbreaking cloning experiment took place. From the story:
The admission by Sir Ian Wilmut in 2006 that he did not personally create Dolly the sheep set tongues wagging across the world of science. His name had been synonymous with the breakthrough that led to the first clone from an adult mammal, but he made clear that his role was a supervisory one.
So when Sir Ian was knighted at New Year for "services to science", controversy was to be expected.
The latest rumblings have come in the form of a petition to the Queen requesting that his knighthood be revoked. It is signed by four former employees of the Roslin Institute, where Dolly was created in 1997. "Wilmut's knighthood is seen as the crowning insult to honest endeavour," they write, adding that their sentiment is shared by others who signed severance deals with Roslin. "Roslin, the University of Edinburgh and Scotland are all tarnished with this grant. We beg
reconsideration."
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Monday, 26 March 2007 |
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By Wesley J. Smith
From The Weekly Standard.
SENATORS DIANNE FEINSTEIN and Orrin Hatch have just introduced Senate Bill 812, which explicitly legalizes human cloning and--since a shortage of human eggs is currently impeding human cloning research (one egg is needed for each attempt at cloning)--the bill also authorizes researchers to pay women to undergo egg procurement.
And if the purpose of the legislation wasn't bad enough, there's its name: Feinstein and Hatch mendaciously named S. 812 the "Human Cloning Ban and Stem Cell Protection Act of 2007."
How can a bill to legalize human cloning be instead called a ban? Through the time-tested method of disingenuous legislating--the bogus definition. Here's a rarely discussed truth: Key words and terms in legislation mean only what a bill's authors say they mean, rather than their actual definitions. If a dung beetle was defined in legislation as a butterfly, for the purposes of that bill, the dung beetle would be a butterfly. Which is essentially what S. 812 does. It defines the term "human cloning" inaccurately and unscientifically so that Feinstein and Hatch can pretend their bill will outlaw human cloning. |
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Read more...
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Ethical Objections to Cloning Children |
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Tuesday, 06 June 2006 |
Daily Telegraph Tuesday 6 June 2006
Sir - I am perplexed by your leader (June 5) claiming that those who object to cloning "on grounds of religion or taste" have no business impeding those enlightened souls who do not. Why should respect for human life and for parenthood not constitute adequate grounds for society to prohibit a practice that violates both at a stroke?
It is not necessary to be a Cartesian dualist to object to creating clone siblings from the remains of an IVF embryo created and killed for the purpose. On the contrary, it is precisely the interests of the bodily individual in his or her own future that are being wrongly thwarted.
Anyone who recognises both that we are bodily beings, and that we have objective interests in our future, can recognise the injustice of creating an embryo simply as raw material for the creation of new embryos. It is difficult to imagine an origin less likely to give a child a sense of unconditional acceptance than a deliberately destroyed "clone original": the child's very body is composed from the body of a sibling rejected as substandard.
Dr Helen Watt, Director, Linacre Centre for Healthcare Ethics, London NW8
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