Former Vice-President and Nobel Laureate Al Gore writes:
“One of the early pioneers of in vitro fertilization, Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, who runs the Los Angeles Fertility Institutes, said that the beginning of the age of activite trait selection is now upon us. ‘It’s time for everyone to pull their heads out of the sand,’ says Steinberg. One of his colleagues at the center, Marcy Darnovsky, said that the discovery in 2012 of a noninvasive process to sequence a complete fetal genome is already raising ‘some scenarios that are extremely troubling,’ adding that amount the questions that may emerge from wider us of such tests is ‘who deserves to be born?’ ’’ …
“According to some estimates, the Chinese government has spent well over $100 billion on life sciences research over just the last three years, and has persuaded 80,000 Chinese Ph.D.’s trained in Western countries to return to China. One Boston-based expert research team, the Monitor Group, reported in 2010 that China is ‘poised to become the global leader in life science discovery and innovation with the next decade.’ China’s State Council has declared that its genetic research industry will be one of the pillars of its twenty-first-century industrial ambitions. Some researchers have reported preliminary discussions of plans to eventually sequence the genomes of almost every child in China.”…
“Those who oppose cloning of people fear that its use would undermine the dignity of individuals and run the risk of ‘commoditizing’ human beings. Cloning does theoretically create the possibility of mass-producing many genetic replicas of the same original – a process that would be as different from natural reproduction as manufacturing is from craftsmanship.”
EDITOR: We recall the potential and ethics of cloning as the subject of the movie “The Boys From Brazil” from back in 1978.
