In the name of research

The creator of Dolly the sheep has been granted a licence to clone human embryos for medical research. Professor Ian Wilmut and Kings College London scientists will clone early stage embryos to study motor neurone disease (MND). Of course there have been the usual critics....some maintain that testing human embryos is immoral. Others question the potential benefits of the work. Others critisise the necessary destruction of embryos as part of the research. Professor Wilmut said it will mean MND can be studied in unprecedented detail.

Professor Wilmut is also quoted (on the BBC Website) as saying " Our aim will be to generate stem cells purely for research purposes". This statement seems like he's attempting some sort of special 'scientific/research' justification for doing this work. Is this the case? Is doing something for 'research purposes' so different from doing it for other reasons. Is doing something for 'research purposes' better than doing something for commercial/financial reasons or for social or political reasons.

It's intersting to consider if we could apply this 'research justification' to other areas related to this topic......In response to the news of Willmut being granted his 'cloning licence', a spokesperson for Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CORE) said: "'Human cloning remains dangerous, undesirable and unnecessary". But do we really know if this is actually the case? Nobody can be one-hundred percent certain whether it's even technically possible to clone an entire human (in the same way as Dolly the Sheep). And we don't know if such a clone would survive, be healthy, suffer any long-term genetic problems, or whether there would be specific economic and social benefits to cloning humans etc. So, in order to answer is there justification to start a project cloning humans.....purely for research purposes of course?

The voxScience Team.