NEW YORK -- "Today's overwhelming and bipartisan House action to prohibit human cloning is a strong ethical statement, which I commend." -- George W. Bush, July 31, 2001
I have absolutely no idea whether the cloning of human beings should be banned. Cloning opponents have some valid points, ranging from their dubious slippery-slope argument -- what if scientists create people in order to harvest their organs? -- to their logical conclusion that replicating people in significant numbers could affect the evolutionary process, ultimately weakening the human gene pool. Most popular is what pundits refer to as the "ick" factor; most compelling (to me, anyway) is my question: Why waste money and scientific energy on such a pointless exercise?
Proponents of human genetic replication, however, are also worth hearing out. Many scientific discoveries that seemed dangerous at first have eventually led to great benefits to humanity. For instance, the radioactivity discovered by Marie Curie a century ago eventually killed her, but her work led others to develop the atomic bomb, which in turn allowed the rise of nuclear power. OK, forget that.