Aggregated News
Cloning surprise sparks raging controversy
Singapore Straits Times
February 14, 2004
A day after South Korean scientists took the world by surprise in announcing the world's first cloned human embryos, scientists, ethicists and politicians scrambled to absorb its implications.
Are humans closer to playing God? Is the breakthrough really a breakthrough? These were among the questions raised.
The clash between politics and science brewed even though the South Korean scientists, Dr Woo Suk Hwang and Dr Moon Shin Yong, insisted they had no interest in making cloned babies.
Many scientists fear the monumental work - which included isolating from one embryo a colony of highly-prized stem cells, which researchers believe have great potential to cure diseases - provided a 'cookbook' for less scrupulous scientists to make cloned babies.
The whirlwind of conjecture and debate was triggered by the South Korean scientists' unprecedented production of scores of cloned human embryos, each a genetic replica of an adult woman.
The goal was to retrieve from those embryos stem cells, which scientists believe have the capacity to regenerate failing organs. They did so...
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