Beware the cowboy cloners
By Hilary Rose,
The Guardian
| 02. 16. 2004
Here we go again. Reading the excited claims for the medical
benefits likely to accrue from the Korean veterinary researchers'
success in growing cloned human pre-embryos, one is entitled
to feeling a certain deja vu. Heading the list were those old
favourites, treatments for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.
There really needs to be a phrase to describe this researchers'
equivalent of the old charge against doctors of shroud waving.
After all, only a few weeks back we were told that the planned
primate research centre in Cambridge was crucial in the search
for treatments for just the same diseases. The truth is that
no one knows if stem cells - the intended end product of therapeutic
cloning - will have such curative powers, still less the solution
to the spinal injuries Christopher Reeve was hoping for in Friday's
Guardian. The right way to find out - the way biomedical research
normally proceeds - is to try the methods first with laboratory
animals. And so far their success, even for the best-understood
condition - Parkinson's - has been limited. This isn't...
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