What's your take on Cloning?
“The Clone Rangers” television documentary broadcast with much advance publicity and promotion Sunday night, July 11th, 1999 by CNN offered a keen insight into the low level of the American public’s awareness about today’s most crucial scientific debate.
This year old report failed to mention the late 1998 isolation and cultivation of stem cells outside the human body. The creation and study of such cells through “differentiation” research promises to cure many diseases and revolutionize the practice of medicine.
The funding of creation and research on stem cells by the U.S. Federal Government is at the core of the current battle over “fetal tissue research’ raging in the U.S. Congress. Cloning and stem cell research is intertwined because there is only one way to create compatible tissue to treat a diseased individual. That would require inserting a cell taken from the patient being treated and inserting it into a denucleated human egg. That process is called nuclear transfer. Nuclear transfer is the basic technique used in cloning.
So, in July, 1999, while the future of science and medical research hangs in the balance in a debate among a bunch of uninformed, public-opinion-poll-worshipping Washington politicians, CNN dusts off an outdated debate and offers it up as “it’s” perspective.
In this historical flashback of the “cloning controversy” the viewing public is left believing that the “1 in 300” attempts which resulted in the birth of Dolly is the current measure of success. No mention was made of the enormous strides made recently in cloning goats in Massachusetts, which begins to rival the IVF success rates at human fertility clinics.
Dr. Richard Seed was the reigning political villain, “The Clone Ranger”, who was determined to clone a human being even if he had to go to Mexico to do it. The “innocent” and “decent” Seed supporters were an infertile couple who saw renewed hope for having their own children through cloning.
“If we used an egg donor,” the wife explained,”then I’d just be a surrogate mother bearing the child my husband was having with another woman!” No understanding or sympathy at the BBC andor Independent production Company 2020 for infertile couples who do not want to spend the rest of their lives raising a child half of who’s genes are those of a stranger--or, at least, someone from outside their marital bond.
Then we have the great opponent to conception of a...