raveneye

President Bush considers human cloning completely unethical, perhaps even evil. However, he believes stem cell research on previously destroyed embryos is ethical because that research does not destroy any human life. This seems to be a fairly common position, although it is a minority among the American public in general, most of whom see no ethical problem of stem cell research on blastocysts (very early human embryos, basically a little microscopic clump of undifferentiated cells).

The most efficient way to create a blastocyst, to be used for stem cells, is by human cloning. You replace the nucleus of an egg cell with the nucleus of a somatic cell, and induce it to divide, and you have a blastocyst. A Korean lab recently figured out how to do this. This is human cloning: if you implant that blastocyst in someone's womb, it will grow into a healthy baby.

Here's the dilemma: if cloning is unethical, then presumably it is unethical to implant this cloned blastocyst into a womb. It would then develop into a cloned baby, genetically identical to the donor of the DNA. (The Korean lab says it will never do this.) But if destroying an embryo is unethical, then it is also unethical not to implant this blastocyst into a womb, because if you don't implant it, it will never develop into a baby and will eventually die.

So here's the question: let's assume that a cloned blastocyst exists. Now that we have it, what should we do with it?

If you have a cloned blastocyst, then there are three things that you could do with it: just destroy it (therefore destroy a human embryo); implant it (therefore allow human cloning); or harvest stem cells from it while destroying it.

Which would you prefer? I'm especially interested in answers from folks who are opposed to stem cell research on ethical grounds. This is of topical interest, because cloned blastocysts will very soon be common and in demand by every lab doing stem cell research.