Thomas Murray Quotes
Creating a child by cloning at this time is a moral outrage …
He prefaced his remarks by stating that he was speaking for himself and not the Commission.
Thomas Murray, National Bioethics Advisory Commission, House Subcommittee Testimony, March 28, 2001
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Once someone implants a clone into a willing human female, there is little society can do to “prevent” the clone from being born unless an abortion were forced on the woman. Many religious fundamentalists who oppose human cloning will fight to protect the life of the clone baby in utero. Eigen’s article observed, for all we know, clones have already been born and are attending school with other children as no one could easily tell that a child (or an adult) is a clone. The Lutheran Church has already taken the position that if a clone were born, the clone would be eligible for membership in the Church and be welcome.
Kass was appointed for his religious, anti abortion views and he is an excellent proponent of one perspective. There are others who do not necessarily see human cloning in such a dark light. Although, the process has to be developed, at some time it well might be a mode by which infertile people could have children. Kass’s criticisms were made by others when in vitro fertilization techniques were being developed.
This is a classic example of a legislator, concerned about the ethics and morality of certain types of scientific experiments, and not understanding the scientific meaning of the terms used, would also make illegal existing and important technologies and cures. In this case, he thinks of cloning as reproducing another exact human being, but we clone human cells every day to produce many of the beneficial medicines we use commonly. And the combination of animals and humans is common in many aspects of modern medicine. For burns the tissue of pigs is used to cover the wound and act as a scaffold on which human skin cells grow. There are millions of people in America and the rest of the world who are leading a normal life with a pig or a cow heart valve. There are ethical problems to be sure but most legislators have little clue as to what they are, and tend to want to outlaw whole areas of science out of their ignorance in in reaction to public pressure from others who do not understand what it is that they want to prohibit.
This was written over 2 decades before Dolly the sheep was first cloned. Since his call for a societal public discussion about cloning, there has been very little, but by the 21st century there had been just a few hasty, ill-informed, almost hysterical efforts to legislate on the subject.
Freedman was the producer and narrator of a TV series on sophisticated topics of science. There are a number of jurisdictions in the world where it is not a crime to clone a human being. Once someone implants a clone into a human female, there is little society can do little to “prevent” the clone from being born. Many religious fundamentalists who oppose human cloning will fight to protect the life of the clone baby in utero. For all we know, clones have already been born and are attending school with other children as no one could easily tell that a child (or an adult) is a clone.
In this case, some anti-abortion advocates who opposed stem cell medical research with fetal stem cells objected also to use of stem cells that were produced by SCNT (Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer). They tried to stop such research in New York State on the grounds that there was a law prohibiting the use of state funds for Human Cloning. They then took the position that SCNY was a form of human cloning. Although almost all biological scientists disagreed, but the decision had to be made by the courts. Judge Garry’s NY Appellate Court opinion conformed the law and the science.
President of The Hastings Center from 1999 to 2012. He was formerly the director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University.
