To Clone or Not to Clone….That is the Question-cc

As of the last few days, the United States has once again been pushed back in the ranks of countries leading the world in technology in medicine. Hwang Woo-Suk of Seoul University in South Korea successfully cloned an embryonic cell from the DNA of a sick patient, the second successful clone in two years.

And here we are in the United States scurrying around with our priorities completely out of wack.

Sick people? disease you say? Screw em’, we need oil and gas for our SUV’s!!!!!

At some point you really have to start to wonder what is happening to our government when even staunch anti-abortion politicians are disagreeing with President Bush’s crusade on banning stem cell research.

Utah republican Orrin Hatch has been stepping up along with numerous other republicans for years in order to push along bills and funding for such research that could help aid Americans with Parkinson’s disease and diabetes.

But once again we hit a wall of arguments from pro-life supporters who believe that by using embryonic cells (THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN THROWN AWAY ANYWAY) we are ending a life.

I just don’t get it.

Honestly, I think that the President and many other opponents know what the benefits of such research would be and would probably support it if they hadn’t buried themselves under piles and piles of “Moral” speeches about the value of “unborn life”.

This isn’t unborn life we are talking about here. These are cells that still need to be implanted manually into a body in order to become a life. If you remove the human element completely, they would never have a chance anyway, so how are we destroying life?

I think that this is an issue that few too many people are focusing on right now. And although I am tempted to side a bit more with the idea of using the cells for research, I can understand why some people are concerned.

If you open the door for cloning, what could possibly slip in underfoot and go unnoticed? Could it be possible for a country to create an army of dispensable cloned soldiers on a mission to kill, kill, kill? Or could people start determining the kind of child they want prior to conception themselves?

And to side with Mother Nature for a second, I can see how cloning to cure disease may offset the natural order of things in life. Maybe we are not all supposed to live till 100. That leads to other problems, such as overpopulation, destruction of forests and the depletion of natural resources.

I almost think that we have natural disasters as a way for the earth to shake off a little extra weight from time to time. I know that sounds bad and all, but realistically, it’s possible.

There are many scary notions to the idea of cloning, but if you think about it in terms of evolution, there have been many scientific advances in the last thousand years that one could have never anticipated, but we couldn’t live with out now.

We’ll just have to wait and see what kind of smart decision our paid lawmakers
can come up with, all the while crossing our fingers that our country won’t become the international version of the slow kid on the short bus.