Human reproductive cloning "inevitable"... just not with animal eggs

It sickens me that I even have to comment on this Wired News article.  Most people have no idea that these things are going on in "reputable" labs in the United States.  Well, I am here to enlighten.

Those super ethical researchers at Advanced Cell Technology (note the sarcasm) have announced that their research has shown that human embryos cloned with somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) using human eggs resemble embryos made the "old-fashioned" way (meaning with egg and sperm.)  This means that human reproductive cloning is a distinct possibility and according to experts is inevitable.  From the story:

For the first time since Hwang Woo-Suk's cloned stem cells were revealed as fakes, human cloning — for medical purposes, or even for reproduction — appears to be a realistic possibility.

"We show for the first time that the same genes turned on in normal human embryos are the same genes turned on in human clones," said Robert Lanza, scientific director of Advanced Cell Technologies and co-author of a study published Monday in Cloning and Stem Cells....

But even if Lanza's embryos cannot develop, other scientists may come up with a more effective process. And though reproductive cloning has not yet been attempted, some experts say it's inevitable.

Unbelievably, cloning human embryos is only the tip of this unethical iceberg.  The article nonchalantly explains how Lanza and the scientists at ACT cloned human embryos using cow, rabbit and mouse eggs to see if any would develop normally:

Research on these hybrid embryos — as well as chimeric embryos, formed by mixing actual human and animal DNA — was approved last year in the United Kingdom. But that approval came after bitter public debate in which opponents raised the specter of sentient human-animal hybrids being used as biological parts factories.

The latest findings suggest that hybrids are incapable of growing to a medically useful stage, much less sentience....

His team compared the gene expression of a human embryo produced
through in vitro fertilization with clones that incorporated human, cow, rabbit and mouse eggs. Several thousand genes were active in the
fully human clones, but almost completely silent in their counterparts, which stopped developing after several days.

Among these were the genetic targets stimulated during induced pluripotency, in which adult cells are returned to an embryo-like state. Their silence suggests that animal eggs will not be useful in making clones capable of generating embryonic stem cells, much less growing to adulthood.

Oh well, that is a relief!  None of the cow-rabbit-mouse-human-embryo-thingys ever had any brain function.  That makes everything OK.  And there is more:

"You can never say never," said Lanza, "but we've been at this a very long time, and despite literally thousands of these attempts, we've never seen one of these hybrids advance further than what we're reporting here.

Read that again.  Thousands of attempts to grow cow-human or rabbit-human or mouse-human embryos.  Excuse me while I lose my breakfast.  Small consolation that Lanza reports that these hybrids are not good for any medical reason.  So can we stop making them now?

There is one more point I want to make here.  This article reports that reproductive cloning is illegal in the U.S. That is false.  There is no federal ban on SCNT in humans.  Until there is, human reproductive cloning is inevitable.  This article shamefully blames Bush for a lack of a global ban on reproductive cloning:

The procedure is illegal in the United States, but a global ban proposed in the United Nations fell apart after the U.S. insisted that therapeutic cloning be banned as well.

"Virtually every country agreed, but President Bush held it hostage," said Lanza.

President Barack Obama has promised to overturn President Bush's moratorium on federal funding of most embryonic stem cell research. Lanza hopes he will abandon Bush's position at the U.N. as well.

There is ONLY ONE way to ensure reproductive cloning does not become a reality.  That is to do what Bush asked and ban ALL SCNT in humans even for research purposes.  Germany and France get it, but somehow we are too stupid to see the writing on the wall.  Bush and Gregory Pence, ethicist and cloning advocate, agree:

"Anything other than a total ban on human cloning would be virtually impossible to enforce. Cloned human embryos created for research would be widely available in laboratories and embryo farms. Once cloned embryos were available, implantation would take place. Even the tightest regulations and strict policing would not prevent or detect the birth of cloned babies." 

--Former President George W. Bush

"Scientists are naive to think they can ban reproductive cloning and go ahead studying embryonic [therapeutic] cloning" 

--Gregory Pence, Ph.D., bioethicist and cloning advocate

In other words, cloned human embryos for research will be produced in the building next door to the IVF clinic, and it will be the IVF doctors that are overseeing the research.  Can you really be certain that one will not sneak a cloned embryo from the cloning lab to the IVF clinic?  If I had a daughter that looked just like me would anyone really know she was a clone without a DNA test?  Think about it.