hether you believe or not, most of us have thought about death, and for many “something” after our present life seems better than a dark eternal gloom forever. Hoping the Bible, Koran and virtually every religious publication are right, let us nevertheless speculate on the biological option, for there is a finite chance that they might all be wrong. I certainly haven’t seen anything close to compelling proof.
What is “eternal life?” In one sense, all living creatures today are essentially already immortal. We should be able to, someday, trace ourselves back through 50 billion DNA copyings over 4 billion years to determine our LUCA. Our DNA has, thus, had everlasting life. While our species almost became extinct in that Great Toba Supervolcano
…show more content…
The vote was 87 in support, 34 in opposition and 70 abstaining or absent. But the edict was non-binding. The European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine prohibits human cloning, but has not been ratified by most countries. There is, further, a Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which bans reproductive human cloning, but it has no legal standing.
So where is the USA on human cloning? Human cloning is legal in the U.S., but there are some Federal prohibitions against research. The George W. Bush regime was especially difficult, and Barack Obama ended the ban on embryonic stem cell research, while remaining opposed to human cloning.
Stanford formed a stem cell institute in 2003 and Harvard initiated efforts to clone human embryos in 2006. They initially were attempting to fund this work with private donors without any government assistance. Mind you, they are not cloning humans, as Harvard would like to harvest stem cells to fight leukemia and diabetes. The University of California at San Francisco announced a similar pursuit. Advanced Cell Technology of Massachusetts is commercializing human embryonic stem cell cloning