As I have posted previously, the United Nations is going to revisit the ban prohibiting all human cloning. This is a non-binding resolution, but cloning activists want to permit therapeutic cloning. It would still ban reproductive cloning.
Australia Will Keep Ban on Hybrid Cloning Despite Britain Vote on HFE Bill tells about two new votes on cloning. The British House of Commons has voted to legalize the mixing of human and animal DNA. British Scientists Propose Human-Animal Hybrid Cloning provides some insight into the interspecies cloning. Almost 10 years ago, scientist Jose Cibelli created a hybrid human-cow embryo, using his own DNA. President Bill Clinton condemned the research.
Now, scientists argue that using cow ova is more expeditious than using human ova to generate human stem cells. This technique is not technically mixing human and animal DNA because the somatic nuclear cell transfer replaces all of the cow's DNA with human DNA. However, the egg cell itself retains mitochondria DNA (mtDNA) from the cow and all future cells generated by the embryo will contain the mtDNA. (Mothers pass on their complete mtDNA to the offspring, as opposed to 50% of the nuclear DNA.)
Stem cell delusions - The government juggernaut rolls on tells there has not been a single disease treated from a stem cell line created from cloned human embryos, but there are over 70 diseases now being treated by using adult or umbilical cord blood stem cells.
Soul searching science discusses two antipodal arguments. “The human embryo lacks every trait that could plausibly be considered a characteristic of human moral value, except one: it has human DNA,”
and "It is consistent with rudimentary biological knowledge to affirm that the embryo is a human individual in its earlier stages of life."
What do you think?
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