Thursday, July 01, 2004

Mammalian cloning continues to pose safety concerns.

From the BBC, there's a story today about U.S. researchers from Cornell who reported to the European Fertility Conference in Berlin that mouse experiments comparing assisted reproduction techniques with cloning showed "significantly impaired development in the cloned embryos compared with those derived from more conventional ART techniques and this has made us more convinced that reproductive cloning is unsafe and should not be applied to humans." The article quotes the executive director of the European Society of Human Embryology and Reproduction: "There is absolutely general agreement that reproductive cloning should be banned. It's clear from all the available experiments that it's much too dangerous." Researchers conduct research, and technologists exploit technology, because scientific challenges exist to be conquered. For the time being, only the most reckless will attempt to clone humans for reproduction, but when the safety issues is tamed, we will have to give serious consideration to the non-safety objections to reproductive cloning that were raised by the President's Council on Bioethics.

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