Word: cloninger
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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You can outlaw technique; you cannot repeal biology. And even the outlawing of this technique--Britain, for example, forbids the cloning of humans--will fail. It is too simple, too replicable. No amount of regulation by the FDA or the NIH or even the FBI will stop it.
Why? Not just because it is so easy, but because its potential for good is so immense. The study of cloning can give the world deep insights into such puzzles as spinal cords, heart muscle and brain tissue that won't regenerate after injury, or cancer cells that revert to...
Of course, the potential for evil is infinitely greater. But there will be no stopping that either. Ban human cloning in America, as in England, and it will develop on some island of Dr. Moreau. The possibilities are as endless as they are ghastly: human hybrids, clone armies, slave hatcheries...
But it's also easy to imagine the technology being misused, and as news from Roslin spread, apocalyptic scenarios proliferated. Journalists wrote seriously about the possibility of virgin births, resurrecting the dead and women giving birth to themselves. On the front page of the New York Times, a cell biologist...
Scientists who have focused their cloning efforts on more forgiving embryonic tissue have met with greater success. A simple approach, called embryo twinning (literally splitting embryos in half), is commonly practiced in the cattle industry. Coaxing surrogate cells to accept foreign DNA is a bit trickier. In 1952 researchers in...