Cloning put to the ultimate test

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There are those who argue "therapeutic" cloning -- in which a human embryo is cloned and killed -- is a great advancement for the human race.

But when I read the recent Science article describing how researchers in South Korea had cloned human embryos, it occurred to me cloning might be the perfect sin. It just might break all Ten Commandments at once.

Follow my thinking on this.

In Korea, 16 women volunteered for "ovarian stimulation." That yielded 242 human eggs. Researchers managed to "squeeze" the nucleus from 176 of these and replace it with the nucleus of another cell from the same donor. These were chemically treated to induce division. In 30, a cloned embryo -- a little girl identical to her mother -- began to develop.

In the womb, these girls could grow into babies. But the researchers did not create them to live; they created them to die. (In Science, they mention "overwhelming ethical constraints preclude any reproductive cloning attempts.")

Why did they kill these embryonic girls? To develop a line of cells they call "SCNT-hES-1." That stands for: Somatic cell nuclear transfer-human embryonic stem cells-1.

In the quest for SCNT-hES-1, they dismembered the embryos, trying to isolate their stem cells. In 20, they succeeded. In just one, they managed to culture the stem cells, creating a "line."

Thirty died in embryo so SCNT-hES-1 could live -- in the testicles of a mutant mouse, called a SCID, which lacks an immune system and thus won't reject human tissue.

This isn't science fiction; it's in Science.