Posted by Jim at February 12th, 2004

As I understand it, a scientist has recently cloned a human embryo.

It brings up a lot of issues. The scientist hopes the knowlege won’t be used for human cloning but seems perfectly happy with the idea that the embryo might be harvested for its stem cells.

Personally I find the idea of cloning a person less problematic than I find creating a human embryo to use as stem cells. Granted, cloning a person isn’t practical or moral at the moment owing to the potential for permanent damage and the very low likelihood of success. A clone, however, is basically a twin.

Theraputic cloning opens more disturbing issues for me. It uses human embryos as material for healing people. As such, one might argue that harvesting embryos for stem cells is comparable to creating human beings for parts.

The possibilities that stem cell research opens up sound wonderful and I’d like to see them pursued somehow, but at a gut level, I don’t like the idea of using embryos to do it.