The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Cloning represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture.
Human cloning is coming.
There are two kinds of cloning right now. One is therapeutic cloning which is for coming up with cures for life threatening, really, really awful diseases. Then there is reproductive cloning, which is to make a human being out of your DNA and a donor egg.
There are a lot of people highly motivated to be the first to clone a human.
Humans are something very different from animals, and the numbers required to get cloning to work in animals are completely prohibitory with humans.
I take the view that anything you can do to relieve suffering or improve human health will usually be widely accepted by the public - that is to say, if cloning actually turned out to be solving some problems and was useful to people, I think it would be accepted.
There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?
I think we can allow the therapeutic uses of nuclear transplant technology, which we call cloning, without running the danger of actually having live human beings born.
Cloning looks like a degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.
No one would want to read a book in which I explain the science of cloning because it would be very dull and it would also make no sense.