This is regarding Dennis Byrne’s “A way around human cloning; Liberals turn a blind eye to promising alternatives like skin cell research” (Commentary, May 6). As Byrne notes in his column, there are promising alternatives to so-called “therapeutic cloning,” an attempt to fudge the fact that the embryos used would be alive and have a complete genetic code and are indistinguishable from those allowed to continue their path toward human birth.
Supporters of cloning create false hope for cures that are neither imminent nor inevitable. Cloning is not only ethically unsound, but medically unproven.
Cloning may also be unnecessary.
A study published March 7 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that adult stem cells circulating in the blood are able to differentiate into a number of organ-specific cells and that they are essentially floating repair kits that play an active role in replacing normal tissue or repairing injured tissue of various organs.
The next step is to figure how to trigger these cells to do what we want when we want.
Stem cells captured from the skin of adult mice and humans have been successfully grown into brain cells, including neurons, smooth muscle cells and a range of other tissues, by researchers at McGill University’s Montreal Neurological Institute.
This proves false the assertion that only embryonic stem cells offer the best and quickest way to finding miracle cures for diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
There is no need for experimentation on human life on the grounds that it is going to be “discarded” anyway, words that could have come from the mouth of Dr. Josef Mengele.
