Ten Years After Dolly Still No Cloned Armies
University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan celebrates the tenth anniversary of the announcement of the cute cloned sheep Dolly. Caplan reminds us of the wild speculations that Dolly's birth provoked. To wit:
Dolly's creation set off a storm of fear, confusion, misunderstanding, pandering and double-talk that culminated in the greatest fraud ever perpetrated in the history of biomedicine — the false claim that a South Korean scientist had cloned human embryos and made stem cells from them.
Just three months after Dolly's advent, I merrily joined in the furor by asking, "What exactly is wrong with cloning people?" I still think that when cloning becomes safe, cloning people will be no big deal.
Caplan tenth anniversary walk down memory lane here.
Disclosure: I am not frightened by clones. I know several, e.g., identical twins. Also, I bottle raised a number of lambs when I was a boy growing up on my family's farm, but none were clones.