LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Human Cloning: Research
built 262 days ago
Senior Fellow of FRC's Center for Human Life and Bioethics applauded the House for voting down the alternative human cloning bill, one that would actually allow for the creation of human embryo "farms" for research. "I salute the House on refusing to be misled by phony cloning bills, with a phony distinction between therapeutic and reproductive cloning. The House knows that cloning is cloning. And today it has gone on record to ban human cloning for any and all purposes."
Source:
The British government introduced legislation in order to allow licensed therapeutic cloning in a debate in January 14th, 2001 after an amendment to the Human Fertilization & Embryology Act 1990. However on November 15, 2001 a prolife group won a High Court legal challenge that effectively left cloning unregulated in the UK. Their hope was that Parliament would fill this gap by passing prohibitive legislation.[7] The government was quick to pass legislation prohibiting reproductive cloning Human Reproductive Cloning Act 2001. The remaining gap with regard to therapeutic cloning was closed when the appeals courts reversed the previous decision of the High Court. Currently therapeutic cloning is allowed under license from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. The first licence was granted on August 11, 2004 to researchers at the University of Newcastle to allow them to investigate treatments for diabetes, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.
Source:
With human cloning such a hot topic, there is considerable need for clear explanations of the unresolved and complex science and social and ethical issues. Bioethicist Pence (philosophy, Univ. of Alabama) tackles the subject head on, arguing for human cloning as a reproductive option. Pence's strengths include his take on the much-hyped issue of genetic (over)determinism, useful analogies to in-vitro fertilization, and coherent reasons for preferring regulation over legislative bans. Unfortunately, the flippant and dismissive tone detracts from his arguments and trivializes difficult issues. The focus on babymaking obscures the opportunity to gain insight into basic human physiology and to advance some of the most promising and jeopardized fetal cell research for applications such as cell-based therapies, gene therapy, and organ and tissue transplantation, all now prohibited from federal funding and essentially unregulated in the private sector. Not an essential purchase, but a timely reminder to examine and update library resources on cloning; librarians could perhaps start with Cloning Human Beings (National Bioethics Advisory Board, June 1997 ) and update with journal articles and books.?Mary Chitty, Cambridge Healthtech, Newton, Mass.
Source:
Fifteenstates have laws pertaining to human cloning. The issue was first addressed by California legislature, which banned reproductive cloning, or cloning to initiate a pregnancy, in 1997. Since thenArkansas, Connecticut, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Rhode Island, New Jersey, North Dakota, South Dakota,and Virginiahave enacted measures to prohibit reproductive cloning. Arizona and Missouri have measures that address the use of public funds for cloning, and Maryland prohibits the use of state stem cell research funds for reproductive cloning and possibly therapeutic cloning depending on how one interprets the definition of human cloning in the statute. Louisiana ... enacted legislation that prohibited reproductive cloning, but the law expired in July 2003.
Source:
Under the guise of advancing medical progress, advocates of human cloning want to create by cloning new, living human embryos for the sole purpose of destroying them in research. Since surveys show that cloning, for any reason, is strongly opposed by the majority of Americans, cloning advocates try to hide what they are doing. They say they are not involved in cloning at all, but instead support "somatic cell nuclear transfer." This is a deliberate attempt to mislead: somatic cell nuclear transfer is simply the process scientists use to create cloned human embryos. Such cloned human embryos can be transplanted to a woman's womb in an attempt to produce a baby, or they can be used - and destroyed - in research.
Source:
In an article in The New Republic on April 22, 2002, Charles Krauthammer, M.D. explained the cloning process and expressed concerns on why human cloning should not be performed. This is how research cloning works. You take a donor egg from a woman, remove its nucleus, and inject the nucleus of, say, a skin cell from another person. By the right manip-ulation you can trick the egg and the injected nucleus into dedifferentiating—that means giving up all the specialization of the skin cell and returning to its original state as a primordial cell. This cell becomes the equivalent of the fertilized egg in normal procreation, except that instead of having chromosomes from two people, it has chromosomes from one. This cell then behaves precisely like an embryo.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Research