Cloning nonsense

Michael Gazzaniga, the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth, is a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and he wrote this piece for the New York Times.

Gazzaniga argues that there is a difference between cloning for therapeutic reasons and cloning for reproductive reasons.  Unfortunately, he is another scientist who puts aside facts to suit his pro-cloning agenda.  He writes:

Calling human cloning in all its forms an "egregious abuse" is a serious mischaracterization. This makes it sound as if the medical community is out there cloning people, which is simply not true.

Actually, isn't cloning people the whole idea?  Creating an organism that is your genetic match, then using its cells to treat you.  That is cloning you.

There is more:

The president's view is consistent with the reductive idea that there is an equivalence between a bunch of molecules in a lab and a beautifully nurtured and loved human who has been shaped by a lifetime of experiences and discovery.

If an embryo, which is a complex organism, is just a "bunch of molecules" then Gazzaniga is just a "bunch of molecules" too.  Honestly, just who is being "reductive" here? (Note the use of the term "molecules" instead of the usual "cells".  It seems the pro-cloners are getting more "reductive" by the minute!)

It keeps coming:

Yet all modern research reveals that DNA must undergo thousands if not millions of interactions at both the molecular and experiential level to grow and develop a brain and become a person. It is the journey that makes a human, not the car.

Really...I guess it is the number and kind of bones a dog chews and where he hides them that makes him a dog, not the fact that he is genetically a dog.  Boy, that is real scientific.  It is the journey that makes us human.  I guess the Human Genome Project was a colossal waste of time.

One more. Gazzaniga asks us all:

Look at your loved ones. Do you see a hunk of cells or do you see something else?

Taking Gazzaniga's reductive reasoning, my love ones ARE a "hunk of cells" as is most life on Earth.  He is only "reductive" when it suits him.  It is okay to be "reductive" with an embryo, but not with our loved ones.  How convenient.  Question: do you think it would be okay with Gazzaniga if we were "reductive" with our loved ones when they were embryos?

Gazzaniga make your point that you are for cloning human embryos for research and therapeutic purposes and let the discussion hang on the merits, just please don't feed us this nonsensical garbage.