National Academy of Sciences: United States should ban reproductive cloning

Wise Young · 01-18-2002, 01:56 PM

http://www.nationalacademies.org/

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) just released a detailed study and recommendations concerning cloning. You can see the full report at the above URL.

It indeed advocates banning of reproductive cloning but strongly recommends more research to bring about practical stem cell therapies, including nuclear transfer (e.g. therapeutic cloning).

They also say that it is important that the ban be re-evaluated in five years, to see if science has advanced enough to warrant reproductive cloning.

The main argument that they make against reproductive cloning is that we do not know enough about cloning to be able to produce good human clones. So, their recommendation is not based on the ethics of cloning as much as it is based on the perception that the science is not advanced enough for the technique to be tried on humans. They indicated that a lot more work needs to be done before it would be safe.

In the report, the NAS go to great lengths to differentiate between reproductive and nuclear transfer. They do not consider the latter to be "cloning". I think that this is important. This is of course what Britain recognizes and the anti-cloning law that they passed prohibits implantation of a non-fertilized cloned egg into a human uterus.

Wise.

Wise Young · 01-18-2002, 02:28 PM

The actual address for the report is at http://books.nap.edu/html/human_cloning/ where you can download the report chapter by chapter. For convenience and people who have fast access to internet, I put all the chapters into one big pdf file on the CareCure Community Web site

Wise.

01-18-2002, 01:56 PM	#1
Wise Young Administrator Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: New Brunswick, NJ, USA Posts: 37,988	National Academy of Sciences: United States should ban reproductive cloning http://www.nationalacademies.org/ The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) just released a detailed study and recommendations concerning cloning. You can see the full report at the above URL. It indeed advocates banning of reproductive cloning but strongly recommends more research to bring about practical stem cell therapies, including nuclear transfer (e.g. therapeutic cloning). They also say that it is important that the ban be re-evaluated in five years, to see if science has advanced enough to warrant reproductive cloning. The main argument that they make against reproductive cloning is that we do not know enough about cloning to be able to produce good human clones. So, their recommendation is not based on the ethics of cloning as much as it is based on the perception that the science is not advanced enough for the technique to be tried on humans. They indicated that a lot more work needs to be done before it would be safe. In the report, the NAS go to great lengths to differentiate between reproductive and nuclear transfer. They do not consider the latter to be "cloning". I think that this is important. This is of course what Britain recognizes and the anti-cloning law that they passed prohibits implantation of a non-fertilized cloned egg into a human uterus. Wise.

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01-18-2002, 02:28 PM	#2
Wise Young Administrator Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: New Brunswick, NJ, USA Posts: 37,988	The actual address for the report is at http://books.nap.edu/html/human_cloning/ where you can download the report chapter by chapter. For convenience and people who have fast access to internet, I put all the chapters into one big pdf file on the CareCure Community Web site Wise.