Makin' Babies

You won't believe it, but there's bad news out of the United Kingdom!

LONDON — The British government Tuesday gave the creator of Dolly the Sheep a license to clone human embryos for medical research into the cause of motor neuron disease.

Ian Wilmut, who led the team that created Dolly at Scotland's Roslin Institute in 1996, and motor neuron expert Christopher Shaw of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, plan to clone embryos to study how nerve cells go awry to cause the disease. The experiments do not involve creating cloned babies.

Stop me if you've heard this one, but an embryo is a baby. Considering that there is no shortage of children in the world, how can this be seen as anything but an exploitation of human life? If life begins at conception (which it does, no matter what Howard Dean, Betty Friedan, and Helen Gurley Brown say), how can this be treated as anything less sinister than the experiments that Nazi's carried out on Jews during the holocaust?

"Uh, yeah, so we're going to manipulate these 'embryos' for medical research."

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against cloning in theory (though I don't think you can beat the stringent quality control of good old fashioned intercourse), but to clone embryos for medical research is as irresponsible as science can get.