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The embryos killed are the first class of victims; the second class of victims will be the rest of us. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is the sort of timeless morality tale students read as an antidote, or at least an objection, to the hedonism that seems to follow naturally from youthful ideas about immortality. The story is familiar to many: Dorian Gray is a narcissist who wishes that a portrait of him — his copy in paint — would age in his place. His wish comes true, and though his life is corrupted by a pursuit of...

There has been a great deal of confusion and obfuscation surrounding the news this week that scientists have cloned human embryos for the first time. Embryonic stem-cell research advocates have been distorting basic facts about cloning for well over a decade. As Wesley J. Smith aptly notes, the basic biological distinction between cloning embryos and deriving stem cells from those embryos is perhaps the first thing that journalists and research advocates forget or conceal when discussing therapeutic cloning. What the Oregon cloning researchers reported this week was that they had cloned embryos and then destroyed those embryos to create...

Cardinal Seán P. O'Malley of Boston speaks at a press conference for the 2012 USCCB Fall General Assembly. Credit: Michelle Bauman/CNA. Boston, Mass., May 15, 2013 / 02:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley called the successful production of embryonic stem cells by cloning human embryos an “abuse� which ignores the dignity and value of the human person. “The news that researchers have developed a technique for human cloning is deeply troubling on many levels,� the archbishop of Boston, who chairs U.S. bishops' pro-life activities committee, said May 15. “Creating new human lives in the laboratory solely to...

They're usually thought of as a brutish, primitive species. So what woman would want to give birth to a Neanderthal baby? Yet this incredible scenario is the plan of one of the world’s leading geneticists, who is seeking a volunteer to help bring man’s long-extinct close relative back to life. Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School believes he can reconstruct Neanderthal DNA and resurrect the species which became extinct 33,000 years ago. His scheme is reminiscent of Jurassic Park but, while in the film dinosaurs were created in a laboratory, Professor Church’s ambitious plan requires a human volunteer. He...

IMAGINE a football match pitting 11 clones of Wayne Rooney against 11 more clones of the same spud-faced Manchester United striker. Even avid Wayne-watchers might find it a bit dull. But polo fans may one day be treated to something similar. No one is proposing to clone the stallions who wield the mallets, of course. But the stallions they sit on are another matter. Outstanding polo horses are hard to find and horribly expensive. Each world-class rider may have dozens, the best of which may cost more than $200,000 each. So breeding great mounts is big business. It used to...

Last year on the 50th anniversary of the creation of the contraceptive pill its inventor Carl Djerassi spoke of the coming dramatic changes to reproductive options -- of the technologies that will have just as big an impact on society in the 50 years to come. After sex without reproduction, reproduction without sex. In an article in the UK's "traditional values" tabloid, the Daily Mail, titled "A Terrifying Future for Female Fertility," Djerassi said, "There are an enormous number of well-educated, proficient women who, when facing the biological clock, first pay attention to their professional ambitions...in the next 20...

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, July 20, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - World famous opponent of South African apartheid, Nelson Mandela, celebrated his 89th birthday last Wednesday by announcing the formation of a Global council of elders, known simply as "The Elders."So far The Elders includes Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Mary Robinson, Jimmy Carter, Li Zhaoxing, Muhammad Yunus, Ela Bhatt, Graca Machel, and, of course, Nelson Mandela.  The group of high-profile international leaders is intended to be an independent body of "wise" men and women that will use their combined experience to solve any of the host of problems currently...

At the height of the great Embryonic Stem Cell Hype, Hwang Woo-suk fraudulently claimed to have created human cloned embryos and derived stem cells therefrom. He paid a price in reputation but not his freedom, despite obtaining research grants under false pretenses. Now, another Korean stem cell scientist stands accused of falsifying research reports. From the Korea Times story: A stem cell researcher at Seoul National University (SNU) is suspected of fabricating 14 studies submitted to international scientific journals for publication, the school said Monday. The misconduct of the researcher, if proven to be true, could deal a severe blow...

Today the newly emerged worldview of many scientists sets caution aside and moves into immediate use of the new molecular genetic techniques in food. Scientists who question this position are often seen by their peers as heretics.... in 2006, the USA Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved milk and meat from cloned cattle, pigs and goats for the human food chain without labelling; • large biotechnology companies are already engaged in promoting transgenic livestock as a means of improving animals and their products for human consumption (Biotechnology Industry Organization, 2008);... the use of transgenic livestock in practical farming and in...

Four years hasn't been long enough to forget. Some supporters of Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential bid, including Texans, remain bitter over how the last primary turned out, and they want their candidate back on the ballot this year, one way or another. Petitions are being circulated to encourage Clinton to resign as secretary of state and run for president; write-in efforts are under way to put her name at the top of the ballot. Some say they wouldn't mind if President Barack Obama did what has long been whispered: swap the jobs of Clinton and Joe Biden, making Clinton the...

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Sunday compared his war against reproductive rights and gay rights to the Civil Rights Movement, and attacked Newt Gingrich for putting social issues "in the back of the bus." "In terms of social issues [Gingrich] has been married three times, he has two divorces, he's admitted to infidelity," ABC's Christiane Amanpour noted during an interview with Santorum. "Should voters hold that against him?" "I think character is definitely an issue," Santorum opined. "I've been married 21 years, I have seven children. That's a factor that people are going to look at and should look...

Human embryonic stem cells. Credit: Nissim Benvenisty, Courtesy Public Library of Science (CC BY 2.5) Denver, Colo., Oct 8, 2011 / 06:50 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A recent experiment cloning human embryos for potential stem cell use did little to advance a medical breakthrough and violated human life, Catholic experts said in reaction to the news.“The attitudes of the scientists involved,” said Fr. Thomas Berg, head of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person, show a “profound disrespect for the goods inherent to natural procreation and a demeaning of human life.”In an experiment publicized Oct. 5 in the...

A total of 60 Bulgarian citizens have now been arrested by police authorities across Europe for participating in a large international scheme for credit card forgery and other crimes.The gang has been active since nine years and has accumulated a fortune estimated at over EUR 50. Around 5000 police officers from Spain Bulgaria, Italy, Poland, Germany, US intelligence agents and experts from Europol have contributed to the operation, codenamed Night Clone Card.The Bulgarian crime ring, which has been described as the world's largest in the sphere of bank card cloning, has been active mostly in Italy, where nine suspects were...

A genetics research group working in a lab in Kansas, has succeeded in creating a new species of lizard by mating two distinct species of North American Whiptails, both native to New Mexico. The offspring, all females are not only fertile, but can reproduce by laying eggs that don't need to be fertilized, which means, they actually clone themselves. Scientists have known for years that some species exist due to interspecies mating, the whiptail lizards have provided proof of that; they’ve been creating new species themselves for at least several hundred thousand years. What’s new is the process being manipulated...

In 1997, Barack Obama was a "Senior Lecturer" at the University of Chicago Law School. On December 13, 1997, Professor Obama administered a final exam to his law students... The first question: help a married couple clone their only daughter. The scene is set by then-Professor Obama thusly: Mary and Joseph are middle-aged parents. Their daughter, Dolly, was in a horrible car accident, after which she entered a "vegetative state." After discussing the issue, and faced with a "void," her parents have decided to clone her, even though the will that Dolly had left is vague about what she wanted...

A bill attempting to head off possible human cloning is starting its travel through Minnesota’s Legislature. The human cloning ban is a priority of the state’s dominant anti-abortion group, Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life. The legislation would make it a felony to attempt, perform or aid in cloning by combining embryonic eggs with the nucleus removed and other human cells.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Scientists fretted Friday that a spectacular cloning fraud that hid in plain sight has set back legitimate stem cell work around the world. Cloning experts and stem cell scientists said research in the potentially revolutionary field of regenerative medicine will continue unabated. But they said public confidence in their work had been weakened by a sham branded by experts as the most visible case of scientific fraud they could recall. Scientists also struggled to explain how they didn't earlier catch the charismatic South Korean veterinarian's claim in a Science paper published in May that he cloned...

Japanese scientists believe they have the technology and know-how to create a living woolly mammoth, a clone of a species that died thousands of years ago. Finding a fully intact frozen woolly mammoth isn’t enough, it seems. Now, a professor at Kyoto University in Japan is planning to bring the species back from extinction through cloning, reports the AFP. Dr. Akira Iritani plans to insert the nuclei of mammoth cells into a modern elephant’s egg cell, creating a woolly mammoth embryo that will be brought to term by an elephant mother. The elephant was chosen because it is the nearest...

TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese researchers will launch a project this year to resurrect the long-extinct mammoth by using cloning technology to bring the ancient pachyderm back to life in around five years time. The researchers will try to revive the species by obtaining tissue this summer from the carcass of a mammoth preserved in a Russian research laboratory, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported. "Preparations to realise this goal have been made," Akira Iritani, leader of the team and a professor emeritus of Kyoto University, told the mass-circulation daily. Under the plan, the nuclei of mammoth cells will be inserted into an...

Japanese researchers will launch a project this year to resurrect the long-extinct mammoth by using cloning technology to bring the ancient pachyderm back to life in around five years time. The researchers will try to revive the species by obtaining tissue this summer from the carcass of a mammoth preserved in a Russian research laboratory, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported. "Preparations to realise this goal have been made," Akira Iritani, leader of the team and a professor emeritus of Kyoto University, told the mass-circulation daily. Under the plan, the nuclei of mammoth cells will be inserted into an elephant's egg cell...

This week marks the beginning of the end of the long national nightmare known as the 111th Congress.  Republicans were given a second chance—by default—through a national effort to stop the destructive Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda. House Republicans are poised to begin making the same kind of business-as-usual mistakes that relegated the party to minority status in 2006.  The most glaring example is the looming threat of having Rep. Fred Upton (RINO-Mich.) become chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, despite his liberal voting record, simply because he’s next in line.  If there is one thing voters made absolutely clear...

A drill monkey, Mandrillus leucophaeus, at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. Photo: Grendelkhan, Wikimedia Commons Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and San Diego Zoo have collaborated to create stem cells from the skin cells of a dead drill monkey, an endangered monkey native to Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria and Cameroon. The scientists, speaking at the International Society for Stem Cell Research in San Francisco, hope that the "induced pluripotent stem" (iPS) cells thus created can then be biochemically persuaded into becoming sperm and egg cells. They can then be implanted into the womb of another...

AUL's Kagan File: The "Human Cloning" MemoMEMORANDUMTO: [Undisclosed Parties]FROM: Americans United for Life Legal TeamDATE: June 9, 2010RE: Elena Kagan File: Advocated Cloning Humans for Research Backgrounder: During the time that Elena Kagan served as a top domestic policy advisor for President Bill Clinton (1997-1999), she played a key role in shaping and executing the President’s response to the development of new cloning technology. Memoranda and emails released by the William J. Clinton Presidential Library on Friday document Kagan’s involvement in crafting an anti-life position and legislative proposal. In a May 29, 1997 memo to the President, Kagan and Jack...

White House memos from 1997, when Elena Kagan was a top domestic policy advisor to President Clinton, show that Kagan -- nominated to the Supreme Court by President Obama -- recommended that the Clinton administration permit cloning of human embryos for research purposes. Writing just months after Scottish researchers had announced the birth of a cloned sheep, Kagan and another Clinton aide recommended that the president announce a ban on cloning that would lead to the birth of human infants, but emphasized that the policy "would not ban the creation of cloned embryos for research purposes.

Arizona is joining Louisiana in prohibiting scientists from creating "human-animal" hybrids. Louisiana enacted its law last year, and Gov. Jan Brewer signed the Arizona legislation into law on Friday. The Arizona statute effect in July. It prohibits human cloning through various means, including fertilizing human eggs with nonhuman sperm and vice versa. It also makes it a crime to knowingly destroy human embryonic stem cells during research. As in Louisiana, supporters of the Arizona legislation said it would prohibit human cloning and protect the dignity of human life at its earliest stages. Critics variously ridiculed the bill and said it...

Last year DISCOVER asked the question, “Did We Mate With Neanderthals, or Did We Murder Them?” Now, Zach Zorich at Archaeology magazine is asking another big question about our hominid siblings: Should we bring them back? Thanks to a slew of recent advances, the possibility is getting closer. 80beats reported a year ago that researchers had published the rough draft of the Neanderthal genome. However, that’s likely to contain many errors because it’s so difficult to reconstruct ancient DNA. Within hours of death, cells begin to break down in a process called apoptosis. The dying cells release enzymes that chop...

A plant that started life during the last Ice Age is still going strong in the arid scrublands of California, scientists revealed today. Researchers believe the Jurupa Oak has been around for 13,000 years, making it the oldest living plant in the world. The oak is made up of a community of cloned bushes and scientists believe it has managed to survive the extreme effects of climate change by regenerating.

ENID, Oklahoma (Reuters) - To the untrained eye, Pollard Farms looks much like any other cattle ranch. Similar looking cows are huddled in similar looking pens. But some of the cattle here don't just resemble each other. They are literally identical -- clear down to their genes. Of the 400-some cattle in Barry Pollard's herd of mostly Black Angus cattle there are 22 clones, genetic copies of some of the most productive livestock the world has ever known. Pollard, a neurosurgeon and owner of Pollard Farms, says such breeding technology is at the forefront of a new era in animal...

The first so-called “DNA cloning” was performed in 1972 by Molecular Biologist Paul Berg who integrated and expanded a quimeric gene - a mixture of both bacterial and viral origin. Since then, Escherichia Coli (a Gram negative bacterium that is commonly found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded animals; vegetal cloning (largely used in agronomy since the mid-1960s), and animal cloning (from reptiles, fish and amphibian) have been instrumental in paving the way to the successful cloning of mammals since 1986, which cleared the way for human reproductive cloning, leading us to the scientists who vehemently oppose the practice.....

SFAHAN, Iran — Iranian scientists have become the first in the Middle East to clone a cow as part of the country's stem cell research, the leader of the project said Saturday. The male cow, named Bonyana, was born Saturday in the city of Isfahan in central Iran, said Dr. Mohammed Hossein Nasr e Isfahani, head of the Royan Research Institute. Besides its nuclear activity and nascent space program, Iran has sought to highlight advances in other technologies such as cloning and medicine. The government set a goal to become a regional leader in advanced sciences and technology by 2025....

Women who say they don't need a man may well be right – after human sperm was created in the lab. The breakthrough could give hope to infertile couples and men left unable to have children after having cancer treatment. But don't worry guys, the scientists who created the sperm using stem cells don't plan to take you out of the baby-making process just yet. 'While we can understand some people may have concerns, this does not mean that humans can be produced in a dish and we have no intention of doing this,' said researcher Prof Karim Nayernia. 'The...

Michael Jackson 'obsessed with cloning himself' Michael Jackson was obsessed with immortality and the idea of cloning himself, according to his former chauffeur Al Bowman. 07 Jul 2009 The King of Pop reportedly attended a Las Vegas conference on human cloning with longtime friend Uri Geller, according to Mr Bowman. Mr Bowman, who drove the pair to the event in 2002, said Jackson was particularly impressed with a group called the Raelians, who believe the key to eternal life is cloning. Jackson's reaction following the conference, Mr Bowman said: "Jackson was very excited. "He bounced out of that conference like...

Introduction In today's humanistic culture, individuals are tinkering with ethical boundaries in science, namely genetics, pushing research and experimentation to the limit. In 1973, the monumental court case, Roe v. Wade, altered the bioethical playing field in the United States forever. For the first time in history, a mother could kill her unborn child without any legal consequences. Years later, a sheep named Dolly was cloned in a Scottish laboratory, and scientists around the world claimed they could clone human beings next. Likewise, stem cell research is one of the pivotal debates of the twenty-first century. In-vitro fertilization poses severe...

Some research advocates and scientists are upset that techniques they support would get no federal money. Many scientists hoped President Obama would end what they saw as the politicization of embryonic stem cell research. They thought all Bush administration funding bans would vanish, easing the way for unimpeded research that could yield interventions for physicians to use in treating everything from Parkinson's disease to diabetes. But those hopes may be running into political reality.The National Institutes of Health in April proposed overturning some Bush-era restrictions on federal funding for stem cell research while leaving others in place. The rules would...

James Dewey Watson is an American molecular biologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA. In a 1971 article to the medical established, recently re-published– he wrote that “the embryological development of man does not occur free in the placid environment of a freshwater pond. Instead, the crucial steps in human embryology always occur in the highly inaccessible womb of a human female.” This profound statement has been turned upside down with new reproductive technologies - technologies which has created unforeseen possibilities of experimental manipulation of the human reproduction process. Watson’s comment was based in...

SEOUL, South Korea – South Korean scientists say they have engineered four beagles that glow red using cloning techniques that could help develop cures for human diseases. The four dogs, all named "Ruppy" — a combination of the words "ruby" and "puppy" — look like typical beagles by daylight. But they glow red under ultraviolet light, and the dogs' nails and abdomens, which have thin skins, look red even to the naked eye.

A United States-based fertility doctor claimed to have cloned 14 human embryos and transferred 11 of them into the wombs of four women. In an interview published on Wednesday, Panayiotis Zavos told Britain’s Independent newspaper that although none of the women had had a viable pregnancy as a result, the first cloned baby could now be born within a couple of years. “There is absolutely no doubt about it... the cloned child is coming. There is absolutely no way that it will not happen,” he said, quoted by the paper. “If we intensify our efforts, we can have a cloned...

Happy April Fool's day, here's your prank. Ben & Jerry's, the autonomous Unilever subsidiary with the environmental bent, celebrated every reporter's favorite holiday with a spoof Web site for a fictional company called "Cyclone Dairy" whose milk and other products comes entirely from cloned cows. "Today, cloning is more than a reality," the site's homepage says. "It’s a promise for a more wholesome world. CyClone will be the first dairy brand to offer great-tasting products made exclusively from cloned cows." The joke is playing off guidance from the Food and Drug Administration that will allow companies to use clones in...

"President Barack Obama says human cloning is ‘dangerous, profoundly wrong' and has no place in society." So claimed the President as he lifted the restriction on embryonic stem cell research. To be clear, the restriction imposed by former President Bush didn't ban embryonic stem cell research -- it banned the use of Federal dollars in such research. President Obama's statement that human cloning is "dangerous and wrong" is a non sequitur in its context, because there is no material difference between abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and cloning. They differ in appearance, they sometimes differ in ends, but they differ...

Here's the final installment of the E-mail debate between conservative Catholic legal scholars Robby George and Doug Kmiec over whether President Obama's executive order on embryonic stem cell research authorizes federally funded human cloning. In the first E-mail in this post, Kmiec responds to George's point-by-point analysis of Obama's new embryonic stem cell research policy, arguing that Obama's policy will very likely outlaw human cloning. In the second E-mail, George closes the debate by decrying Kmiec's definition of human cloning and invites him to debate the matter in public.

<p>Last week, the White House invited me to a signing ceremony overturning the Bush (43) executive order on stem cell research. I assume this was because I have long argued in these columns and during my five years on the President's Council on Bioethics that, contrary to the Bush policy, federal funding should be extended to research on embryonic stem cell lines derived from discarded embryos in fertility clinics.</p>

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama says human cloning is "dangerous, profoundly wrong" and has no place in society. Obama made the comments as he was signing an executive order that will allow federal spending on embryonic stem cell research.

LONDON: The ethical aspect notwithstanding, an Italian doctor has claimed to have cloned three human babies who are "healthy" and now living in eastern Europe. "I helped give birth to three children with the human cloning technique. It involved two boys and a girl who are nine years old today. They were born healthy and they are in excellent health now," the Daily Telegraph quoted Severino Antinori as telling the 'Oggi' weekly. "The women's eggs were impregnated in a laboratory through a method called 'nuclear transfer'," he said, adding that the method used was "an improvement" over the technique used...

  Extinct Ibex Clone Dies at Birth by Brian Thomas, M.S.* The last of a type of wild mountain goat was found dead in the mountains of northern Spain in 2000. The Pyrenean ibex, characterized by its curved horns, was officially declared extinct, but not before tissue samples were collected and preserved in liquid nitrogen.Scientists used DNA extracted from the samples and, replacing the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, cloned a female Pyrenean ibex—the first extinct animal to be cloned. Unfortunately, the clone died shortly after birth “due to physical defects in its lungs. Other cloned animals, including...

For the first time, scientists have succeeded in recreating an extinct breed of Spanish mountain goat, the ibex, thereby bringing an animal back from extinction. For seven minutes, then the laboratory creation died again.

Enlarge ImageBad programming. These hybrid embryos, in which human DNA has been placed in animal eggs, don't turn on the same genes as human embryos. Credit: ACT/Cloning and Stem Cells Can a person be cloned? And can human-animal hybrid embryos produce stem cells that shed light on human diseases? "Probably" and "no" are the respective answers to these provocative questions, according to a study out today. Ever since researchers cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996 by transferring the nucleus of one of her cells into the nucleus-free egg of another sheep, scientists, ethicists, politicians, and the public have wondered...

Federal regulators have green-lighted the first trial of an embryonic stem-cell treatment in humans. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the go-ahead for Geron Corporation to start a phase I safety trial of its therapy GRNOPC1 for spinal cord injuries, the Menlo Park, Calif.–based company announced today. It first sought permission for the trial four years ago and spent much of the last year trying to satisfy the FDA’s concerns about it. "This marks the beginning of what is potentially a new chapter in medical therapeutics—one that reaches beyond pills to a new level of healing: the restoration...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers who tried to use mouse, cow and rabbit eggs to make human clones said on Monday the effort failed to produce workable embryos but added that they showed human cloning should work in principle. Mixing human and animal cells does not appear to program the egg properly, said Dr. Robert Lanza of Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology.

Family Research Council recognizes and respects the inherent dignity of every human life from conception (whether by natural or artificial means) until death. FRC desires to help build a culture of life, holding that all human life is a gift to be treasured. The life of every human being is an intrinsic good, not something whose value is conditional upon its usefulness to others or to the state.Threats to human life include abortion, euthanasia, and many new forms of biotechnology. However, human beings need not prove their moral worth by demonstrating sentience, or self-awareness, or a certain level of cognitive...

The connection between politics and eschatology (Christ’s second coming) is little known to all but a few today. This enables many whacky and sometimes dangerous political figures to slip in un-noticed by a slumbering and apostate church. That even those politicians don’t know the role they are playing offers little consolation. How can we avoid this? Between Hollywood, the new craze for Christian novels (fiction) and the old series of “Left Behind” flicks the average person, Christian or not, has been shown a picture of last day’s figures and personalities that is anything but accurate. Pictures of the antichrist and...