Passing strange that the chaps in Melbourne should wait until a month before the next federal legislative review is due, and then make their exciting announcement of a cloning trial. Just too caught up with other things since 2006? Bit busy; perhaps discouraged that their colleages in Sydney (and the rest of the word, for that matter) have not been able to get a single stem cell from their cloned embryos? Obviously nothing to do with fabricating a sense of significance around this redundant science in time to dupe the MPs yet again.
Fooled by hype and emotional blackmail ("how dare you stand in the way of a cure for my ...insert disease category.... child!") in 2003, browbeaten by emotional blackmail and hype in 2006 - yes, it is entirely possible that the MPs will again go supine before the solemn claims of scientists that "we really need to research everything" if we are to make the lame to walk and the blind to see.
No, for once, dear representatives, get clear that this science is not only a vile corruption of our humanity - intentionally creating embryonic human life for the sole purpose of destructive research - but is as dead and dated as Dolly. We are in a magnificent new era, the era of Yamanaka's iPS direct reprogramming, where the exact stem cells that cloning hoped to obtain, but never did, have now been obtained in spades by an ethically uncontentious method. Cloning has lost the only justification it ever had, and the one serious argument that got it past the Parliement in 2006.
Again, this article from the SMH's science reporter has some rigour in not dodging the nature of cloning - as the making a a living human embryo with the sole purpose of research . Note the correct description in the article:
In this procedure a person's DNA would be put into an egg to produce a days-old
cloned embryo from which embryonic stem cells could be extracted.
Posts
