Michel's Commentary

12/1/2001  888WebToday     Michael West, President of the Advanced Cell Technology in Worchester, Massachusetts, shook the world this week when he announced that his company had successfully cloned a human embryo.

In those innocent days before the terrorist attack on September 11th, you may recall that the biggest story of the summer was the announcement by President Bush that federal funding for stem cell research would not be permitted.  This decision was highly controversial at the time and the wisdom of it was widely debated.

But what was lost sight of at the time - was that the decision extended no further than the involvement of our own federal government.  It did not prevent stem cell research from going forward under private auspices or in other countries.  It did not and could not prevent Michael West from cloning a human embryo.

For all the fuss it caused, the President's decision was largely symbolic.  It could not prevent the cloning of embryos - and it cannot  prevent us with having to wrestle with the moral implications that this breathtaking scientific breakthrough confronts us with.

But there does seem to be a general agreement about one thing:  the generation of full, living human beings through cloning would not be a good idea.  The notion that human beings could be cultivated would truly bring us a race of structurally engineered automatons ... with the express duty to serve a government master ...not a good idea!

But cloning embryos from which cells and organs may be grown is not the same thing as producing mature human beings. Granted, if one believes that human life begins at conception, there is still the problem involved in destroying the embryo once it has served its purpose.  This is what President Bush was referring to when he denounced the breakthrough by ACT, saying that we should not grow life to destroy it.

Yet even if Mr. West had not presided over the first cloned human embryo, wouldn't we still have the same problem?  Fertility clinics all over America store and freeze human embryos - and eventually dispose of most of them - this is not a new process.

Meanwhile, stem cell research, involving cloning, seems destined to go forward, whether under government auspices or private ones, whether in the USA or abroad.

It also seems highly likely that we will have the cloning of a full human being some day, because this technology will be there and somebody, somewhere, will want to do it, legal or not.

The question is: do we deny life for those who the stem cells can bring help to now ..replace organs and eradicate disease ..Or do we stop the process, because of what someone might do in the future?

I leave with you with that question .....

Those are my thoughts .....

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