SubscribeWhen scientists divided human eggs without sperm, they thought they’d a technique to overcome ethical objections to human stem cell research. But they were wrong: ‘I’d be happier if it was beyond all reasonable doubt that it could not become a human life,’ says Josephine Quintavalle of CORE, which claims ‘to facilitate informed and balanced debate’, but is little more than a ‘Pro-Life’ front. That the embryos fail to reach more than a microscopic 50 to 100 cells, is not the point for those who fear human cloning.
The real fear is not of, but for god, who is looking ever more distant. Biological science understands humans in the same way it understands other animals and psychology debates whether to counsel the depressed, or use cheaper methods to alter the brain’s chemical balance. Science and religion have never got on particularly well and some Christians still hold that the church was right and Galileo was wrong when he pushed the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun. These new advances promise to destroy an even more important tenet of the Judeo-Islamo-Christian consensus: humans are animals. Get over it.
Human cloning, Christopher Reeve & Michael J Fox……On animal fashion, morality and suffering……Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals by John Gray……Christianity no more inventive than Islam
