I just read that Britain has approved the use of stem cells from human embryos for research with possible applications to the treatment of various diseases, including cancer, leukemia, and Parkinson's disease. As I recall, the cells would be taken from extra embryos that would normally and routinely be discarded after fertility treatments, and not from aborted fetuses.
All of this sounds reasonable to me. My take on it is that these collections of cells are going to be disposed of anyway, so we might as well be able to do beneficial research with them. I would go farther and allow the use of aborted fetuses as well, with the same rational. I should think that the pro-life contingent would be all for that, since the ultimate goal is the betterment of the human condition and the lengthening of productive life span, but I can't claim to understand the pro-lifers anyway.
I'm not sure why human cloning seems almost universally portrayed in the media as some sort of inherently evil process. There is, to my mind, very little evil about it. I suppose that the image of an army of Hitlers or some such might be at fault, but I think that that is foolish. Your clone would just be your identical twin, born at a different time. The clone would very likely develop into a very different person, even more so than identical twins do. Are identical twins evil? (Of course, TV teaches us that one of every pair of identical twins is evil, but put that aside for now.)
The diversity that arises from the natural reproductive process is our best defense against the cloned army scenario. Once you choose one individual as a template for an army, you get all of his (genetic) weaknesses as well as his strengths. This predictability would be a weakness in a cloned army, and could be exploited. The same argument applies to any homogeneous collection of individuals, even if they have been genetically engineered to remove some or all of the apparent weaknesses.
Another moral qualm is the growing of another copy of yourself to be used as spare parts. This would bother me if an entire individual were at stake. If, however, doctors were able to grow just a knee, or just an eye, without having to grow the entire body (especially the brain), it seems no more immoral to me than using skin grafts or getting transplant organs from cadavers.
I guess that I am just tired of the supposed "sanctity of human life" being exalted above all else. We're just animals that happen to be good with tools and language. We're getting to a stage in our development where we will be able to influence our own evolution directly, both positively (via genetic engineering) and negatively (via environmental poisons, including nuclear weapons). It may even be the case that our purpose in the universe was to invent computers, which may be our evolutionary successors. And I've cloned many, many computers.
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Rant forth and multiply.