Tuesday, September 28, 2004

This was only a matter of time:

BBC NEWS | Health | Dolly scientists' human clone bid

The scientists who cloned Dolly the sheep have formally applied for a licence to clone human embryos to find a cure for motor neurone disease.

If granted, Professor Ian Wilmut's team at Edinburgh's Roslin Institute would clone cells from MND patients to see how the illness develops in an embryo.

Therapeutic cloning for research has been legal in the UK since 2001.

Whether this is successful or not, there will be other such experiments. Sooner or later, somebody will try to produce a clone in order to supply a body part.

As I have yet to come to any personal conclusions about all this, I defer to Star Trek, Deep Space Nine, in which we learned that Federation law gives clones all the rights and protections of naturally produced entities.

No comments: