Is therapeutic cloning a slippery slope leading to reproductive cloning?
“Potentially yes. Therapeutic cloning of human embryos to produce stem cells uses exactly the same techniques as you would use to clone a human being. The UK government and many other Western governments were so worried by this that they banned all human cloning. Now the UK government has changed the law to allow therapeutic cloning under very tightly-controlled circumstances. You can go to jail in this country if you clone an embryo and then either try to implant it in a womb or send it off to a foreign country for others to do that. However that does mean that scientists working in many developing countries who do not have such laws could produce cloned babies. In fact two or three scientists working overseas say they have already done it, but there is no scientific proof of their claims.”Cloning a human baby is so technically challenging and would involve the generation of so many embryos and recruiting so many women to carry the embryos that it is likely to be beyond the scope of r
