human cloning

Human Cloning

Cloning captured public attention when Scottish scientists startled the world by announcing the birth of a sheep named Dolly that had been cloned by combining the nucleus of an adult mammary cell and an enucleated sheep egg. Interest intensified when Richard Seed, a physicist with no expertise in cloning, no institutional affiliation, and no funding, announced that he would clone humans for a fee. Fear that human-cloning factories might soon appear before anyone had a chance to digest the implications of this new technology sent Congress into action. Legislation was introduced in both the Senate and House of Representatives that would ban human cloning indefinitely or impose a long moratorium on it. Such a moratorium was more or less uncontroversial, given the preliminary nature of the technology required to clone animals and the unknown risks of cloning humans.
Unfortunately, the abruptly drafted bills in both the Senate (the Bond-Frist bill) and the House...