George M. Church Quotes
At some point, someone will come up with an airtight argument as to why they should have a cloned child. At that point, cloning will be acceptable.
Church, George M., and Ed Regis. Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. Basic Books, 2012.
He prefaced his remarks by stating that he was speaking for himself and not the Commission.
Freedman was the producer and narrator of a TV series on sophisticated topics of science. There are a number of jurisdictions in the world where it is not a crime to clone a human being. Once someone implants a clone into a human female, there is little society can do little to “prevent” the clone from being born. Many religious fundamentalists who oppose human cloning will fight to protect the life of the clone baby in utero. For all we know, clones have already been born and are attending school with other children as no one could easily tell that a child (or an adult) is a clone.
Once someone implants a clone into a willing human female, there is little society can do to “prevent” the clone from being born unless an abortion were forced on the woman. Many religious fundamentalists who oppose human cloning will fight to protect the life of the clone baby in utero. Eigen’s article observed, for all we know, clones have already been born and are attending school with other children as no one could easily tell that a child (or an adult) is a clone. The Lutheran Church has already taken the position that if a clone were born, the clone would be eligible for membership in the Church and be welcome.
This is a classic example of a legislator, concerned about the ethics and morality of certain types of scientific experiments, and not understanding the scientific meaning of the terms used, would also make illegal existing and important technologies and cures. In this case, he thinks of cloning as reproducing another exact human being, but we clone human cells every day to produce many of the beneficial medicines we use commonly. And the combination of animals and humans is common in many aspects of modern medicine. For burns the tissue of pigs is used to cover the wound and act as a scaffold on which human skin cells grow. There are millions of people in America and the rest of the world who are leading a normal life with a pig or a cow heart valve. There are ethical problems to be sure but most legislators have little clue as to what they are, and tend to want to outlaw whole areas of science out of their ignorance in in reaction to public pressure from others who do not understand what it is that they want to prohibit.
George McDonald Church is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, and chemist. He is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT, and a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. As of March 2017, Church serves as a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Board of Sponsors.
