An interesting cloning dilemma.

A scientist has achieved a world first... by cloning himself.

In a breakthrough certain to provoke an ethical furore, Samuel Wood created embryo copies of himself by placing his skin cells in a woman's egg.

The embryos were the first to be made from cells taken from adult humans.

Although they survived for only five days and were smaller than a pinhead, they are seen as a milestone in the quest for treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

But critics fear the technology could be exploited by mavericks to clone babies and accused the scientists of reducing the miracle of human life to a factory of spare parts.

Researchers from the Californian stem cell research company Stemagen employed the same technique used to make Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal, to create the embryos.

They took eggs donated by young women having IVF and replaced genetic material with DNA from the skin cells of two men.

Needless to say, this is a storm of controversy. It has been only a matter of time before we went from the cloning of embryonic cells to this cloning of adults – even though this particular experiment was terminated at 5 days.

What questions need to be dealt with?

1) Is it proper to clone human beings at all?
2) What rights do cloned individuals have?
3) At what point do cloned individuals acquire rights?

I don't propose to have all the answers to these questions – just the questions themselves. But it appears answers are needed sooner rather than later.

Posted by: Greg at 12:26 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 273 words, total size 2 kb.