2552 Ethics and human cloning

Sounds like an oxymoron to me. Harvard announced this week that they are beginning to clone human embryos for making stem cells. I saw the item in the WSJ, but it appeared in many newspapers. WaPo weighed in with the typical left slant using phrases like "culture wars," "vocal conservative movement," and "ethical wrangling."

"The work, aspects of which have already begun, involves creating embryos not by the usual fusing of sperm and egg but by fusing a patient's body cell -- such as a skin cell -- with a human egg whose DNA has been removed. The resulting embryo would be genetically identical to the patient who donated the skin cell, so stem cells derived from it and transplanted into the patient would probably not be rejected by the immune system."

As near as I could tell from reading the article, the "ethics" decisions involved how to pay the women for their eggs, how to advertise for eggs, and how to get left over eggs from failed fertility efforts. Didn't see much about the destroying of human life aspect of it. I'm sure the Nazi doctors of Germany must have debated certain aspects of experimenting with Jews, who were also not considered human.