Blank Check and Junk Biology in New Jersey’s Question 2

The fix is in for New Jersey voters to go $450 million in debt to fund embryonic stem cell research, now that the courts have permitted a bogus ballot description to go out to voters. Few voters will read the initiative itself, but you can here. (It was very hard to find the actual wording of the initiative. Either I am maladroit in conducting on-line research—a real possibility—or this is yet another game of hide the ball by Big Biotech and its camp followers in the media and in politics.)

In any event, Question 2 purports to prevent the bond funds from being used to conduct research into human cloning:

No funds authorized for, or made available to, an eligible research institution pursuant to this act shall be used for the purpose of human cloning.

Sounds good. But once again, Big Biotech’s minions resort to junk biology to explicitly permit what they purport to outlaw. Here is how “human cloning” is mis-defined in Question 2:

“Human cloning” means human asexual reproduction accomplished by introducing nuclear material from one or more human cells into a fertilized or unfertilized oocyte whose nuclear material has been removed or inactivated so as to produce a human fetus that is substantially genetically identical to a previously born human being.

(My emphasis.)

This wording would not only permit funding research into human cloning—which is accurately defined as the successful completion of human SCNT— but would also explicitly permit the state to use borrowed taxpayers’ money to pay for research on cloned human embryos through the eighth week—since the fetal stage doesn’t commence until week 8.

But the in-the-tank media will never report that—even if they read the actual wording of the initiative rather than merely rely on promoters’ press releases.

Now, couple this junk definition with the radical definition of human cloning in the substantive law of NJ—

As used in this section, “cloning a human being,” means the replication of a human individual by cultivating a cell with genetic material [the SCNT cloning process] through the egg, embryo, fetal and newborn stages into a new human individual.

—which permits cloning, implantation, and gestation through the ninth month, research onto implanted cloned embryos and fetuses would seem to be the ultimate goal.