Cloning for Research
The United Nations may soon give friends of freedom yet another reason to support unilateralism (and cheer the U.N.'s general toothlessness). Having failed in the U.S. Senate, efforts to criminalize therapeutic cloning have gone international. Sponsored by Costa Rica and supported by the Bush administration, a measure to create an international convention to ban all forms of human cell cloning, including cloning for research purposes, has returned to the U.N.
While deeply concerned about potential U.S. laws, I don't share this site's fear of international conventions without enforcement power. Their roundup (via Instapundit is, however, a useful reminder that this issue never goes away.
Meanwhile, thanks to Senate rules and constitutional checks and balances, cell-cloning remains legal in the United States. Although clinical applications are still far away, scientists at Harvard want to clone cells for basic research. From the Boston Globe account (reprinted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer):
The cloning experiments proposed at Harvard represent the next step in the evolution of embryonic stem-cell research, a controversial field that has emerged as an issue in the U.S. presidential campaign. The two teams want to use cloning to produce embryonic stem cells that precisely match the genetic material of patients with juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's disease and a range of other maladies.
Researchers believe that comparing the development of these cloned cells with healthy cells will give them a powerful new tool to study disease and possibly suggest new avenues for treatment.
Both teams are part of the recently formed Harvard Stem Cell Institute, set up by the university earlier this year to fund embryonic and other types of stem-cell research.
"This is exactly the kind of work that we envisioned for the Harvard Stem Cell Institute," said Harvard biologist Douglas Melton, the senior researcher on one of the teams. "We want new ways to study and hopefully cure diseases."
Background on the Harvard Stem Cell Institute is here.