Attempts at Reproductive Cloning Ongoing

Renegade fertility doctor Panos Zavos claims to have tried reproductive cloning in several women, including a 52-year old. He failed and no pregnancies were established. He also claims to have created 4-celled cloned embryos, but they may not have been embryos at all since an egg without a nucleus (or with a non working nucleus) can be stimulated to divide a few times. According to Bill Hurlbut, “This is possible because the messenger RNA and other components necessary for early division are already present in the egg even before fertilization.” I recall when Advanced Cell Technology claimed to have created a 6-celled cloned human embryo and were hooted down for this reason by the science community.

Be that as it may: I think a point to note in all of this is the danger therapeutic cloning poses to the practice of moral medicine. Right now, Zavos is hamstrung. The science of human cloning, so far, hasn’t gotten anywhere fast. But imagine if all of the money that politicians want to throw at cloning research leads to reliable ways to clone human embryos: Unethical characters like Zavos will take that knowledge to the bank and try to create the first cloned baby—no doubt leaving a trail of aborted deformed fetuses in their wake.

The science of human cloning will probably require billions, or perhaps even, tens of billions or more of research dollars to reach the point that cloned embryos can be made reliably for research. The best way to prevent the kind of experiments Zavos and others envision is to outlaw all human cloning as the United Nations General Assembly has urged. That would starve the science of human cloning of funds, which would go a very long way to ensure that Zavos never gets a chance to really do what the nutter Raelians claimed to have done a few years ago; proclaim to a hyper-excited press core that the first cloned baby has been born.