Human Research Cloning, Embryos, And Embryo-Like Artifacts‪.‬

Undeterred by the Korean stem cell scandal, several prominent scientific teams in the United States, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have recently announced plans to pursue their own human research cloning protocols. (1) Their immediate aim will be to generate patient-derived pluripotent stem cells to study the progression of complex, chronic diseases, such as type I diabetes and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Human research cloning involves a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer in which a patient-specific diploid human cell is fused with an enucleated mature egg to develop a blastocyst-stage embryo that is genetically identical to the patient cell donor. Eventually, researchers hope to differentiate patient-derived stem cells in culture to develop new drug therapies and to facilitate the possibility of treating disease and injury at the cellular level without the threat of autoimmune rejection. To achieve these goals, stem cell scientists will attempt to match or improve upon the Hwang team's efficiency rate for producing cloned human blastocysts. (2) Notwithstanding the practical and ethical difficulties surrounding human egg procurement, most critics of embryonic stem cell research maintain that human research cloning should not be pursued because it is in principle wrong. Most opponents of embryonic stem cell research believe it is unethical to destroy early ex vivo human blastocysts regardless of whether they are created by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) or in vitro fertilization (IVF), since they believe both of these methods generate nascent human life. Some go further to argue that human research cloning carries an added moral burden because it would involve the deliberate creation (and subsequent destruction) of burgeoning human life solely for biomedical research, and because it would enliven the dreaded possibility of human reproductive cloning. We argue that each of these concerns may be scientifically and philosophically unwarranted.