Gentlefolk,

Dolly the sheep was born on 5 July 1996, and died 14 February 2003. Sheep can live to 11 or 12 years old, so at 5 years and 7 months, Dolly was relatively young when she died. While there's no proof that cloning was to blame, her relatively early death does fuel the debate about the ethics of cloning research and the long-term health of clones.

As PantyFanatic has pointed out, banning all cloning will have the effect of driving the research to environments where peer review and peer pressure will be unable to influence the research. The therapeutic cloning that Bilbo referred to would also be prohibited if cloning research were banned.

The legal, ethical, and moral issues associated with cloning are neither trivial nor insuperable. As PantyFanatic has pointed out, the problem is not one of science, but of technology. Forty years of molecular biology cannot be wished away. Only a fool could believe that this genie could be put back into the bottle.

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/antenna/dolly/index.asp

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Eudaimonia