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Permit therapeutic cloning

Judith Segard Hunt Berkeley
Thursday January 17, 2002

Editor: 

National and state legislative bodies will soon discuss human cloning. Many safe methods are already open to those wanting a child, while informed reason and the animal clones born to date warn of grave dangers – physical, psychological, and societal – all but certain to attend the birth and consequent life of a cloned human baby. Conversely, animal research with stem cells garnered from clones but a few days old offers promise of cures in humans for diabetes, Parkinsonism, neural destruction, etc. – without tissue rejection, if stem cells from a patient’s own early-stage clone are used. 

Therefore, compassionate and socially responsible legislators (the overwhelming majority, I hope) should speedily support legislation strictly banning reproductive human cloning, at least for the foreseeable future, while permitting therapeutic human cloning research to be unrestricted, save for required destruction of all but stem cells by at most little more than 14 days after inception. 

 

Judith Segard Hunt 

Berkeley