Cloning is Fun
With the recent moratorium on stem-cell research and other promising medical advances, such as cloning, politicians are again wading through domains they have no business wading in.
About the only semi-convincing argument about why it might be a good idea to bad stem-cell or cloning research is some nebulous ``concern'' about fetuses. We've already decided that fetuses aren't people, so this is just another excuse to re-open the debate over abortion, essentially.
Some people pretend that they object to experimenting on ``people'' (or at least human DNA). Well, it's far, far too late to complain about that, since we do it every day by injecting hundreds of millions of tons of waste into our air, water and land. What effect this might have on people via changes to our ecosystems is completely unknown.
Do we care? Apparently not.
But try to do some research with garbage (i.e. discarded fetuses), and watch the (largely uninformed) opinions fly. People try to equate such research with ``killing babies'' (even though fetuses aren't babies, and such research is quite likely to produce medical advances curing or helping many actual people); others try the ``playing god'' approach, attempting to stir up religiously motivated fear (Christian religions are great at this, being a fear-based religion to start); others think such research will lead down a ``slippery slope'' to widespread genetic engineering of humans.
Knowledge is not evil; it's always good. Of course, knowledge can be used for evil ends, but this is not a reason to abandon the knowledge.
It's a Good Thing that the Justice Minister made her recent proposal to legalize some types of stem-cell research, but it should never have been illegal in the first place. What does McKlellan know about stem cell research? About the same as me: practically nothing. Should I get to decide what research goes on? No; neither should McKlellan.
Of course, caution is usually prudent. It might not be a good idea to start making widespread use of some medical procedures, or to release the results of genetic manipulation into the wild (as we're unfortunately already doing with many plants and animals), but these are not reasons to abandon the research. Instead, they are good reasons to keep such research within controlled laboratory environments, or good reasons to not use techniques on humans. Once more knowledge is gained, it might be prudcent to release or make use of such knowledge.
Legislation might deal with the practical uses of certain technologies, or with the conditions under which they may be used to alter our environment, but legislation should never make the collection or advancement of knowledge illegal.