More on Cloning Francis Fukayama

More on Cloning

Francis Fukayama has an interview with Salon on the subject of runaway biotechnology. I am confident that it is being dissected throughout the blogosphere, but don't miss the Gamma Man's review, and his cool link to Kurzweil.

My two cents? Fukayama tries to imagine a "sympathetic scenario" where clonign might seem acceptable: "A child gets killed and the parents don't have any possibility for having another one, and they want to clone that one." How about these possibilities: a nine year old child has a blood cancer, or a kidney failure, or diabetes, and no compatible donors are available for a procedure which might save this child's life. I have read about parents conceiving another child with the hope that the new baby will be a compatible donor. Assuming that the donor is relatively unscarred by the procedure and that the disease is not due strictly to a genetic flaw, would cloning the sick child to produce an indentical, but younger, twin strike everyone as hopelessly beyond the pale of medical ethics?