Quotes
Quotes Concerning Cloning
  • "It's important to remember just what she did contribute. She made biologists think totally different about the ways cells develop for all of the different tissues. The experiments that led to her birth are one of the things that are making people think very differently about how to produce cells to treat Parkinson's disease and other unpleasant diseases."  --Ian Wilmut, leader of the team that created Dolly, concerning the issue of her death.

  • "The real issue is what Dolly died from, and whether it was linked to premature ageing. She was not old--by sheep standards--to have been put down."    --Dr. Patrick Dixon, expert on ethics of human cloning.

  • "We must await the results on the post-mortem on Dolly in order to assess whether her relatively premature death was in any way connected with the fact that she was a clone. If there is a link, it will provide futher evidence of the dangers inherent in reproductive cloning and the irresponsibility of anybody who is trying to extend such work to humans."  --Professor Richard Gardner, chair of the Royal Society working group on stem cell research and therapeutic cloning.

  • "The most likely thing is an infection which causes a slow progressive illness and for which there isn't an effective treatment. Sadly, we have had that in some of the sheep in the farm, so that's the most likely explanation, but we don't know." --Ian Wilmut, leader of the team that created Dolly.

  • "The most likely thing is she caught it from the sheep and it's an unfortunate result of having to be housed in order to give her security and so that we could observe her. Clearly, the whole group is very upset and sad."  --Dr. Harry Griffin, of the Roslin Intitute.

  • "New technologies are frequently controversial, and i think people right away think 'Oh my God, we're going to clone a human being" but that is not what this is about. It will be sad and tragic if this does not go ahead."  --Mary Ann Liebert, publisher of the online journal E-Biomed, concerning the future of genetic research.

  • "The world has to come to grips that the cloning technology is almost here." --Panos Zavos, spokesman for a group of european scientists.

  • "Nobody should get a story until they produce evidence. No matter how telegenic they are, no matter how many Star Fleet Command uniforms they have, if you don’t show up with a baby or a parent or a DNA test, or some witnesses who are credible, you shouldn’t have a story." --Arthur Caplan (commenting on the Clonaid Raelian claims of the first cloned baby).

  • "…Ministers in Britain have too easily swallowed the line that cloning human embryos is essential to medical progress. It is not. …Like stuck records, ministers and policy makers continue to enthuse about therapeutic cloning even though the majority of bench scientists no longer think it's possible or practicable to treat patients with cells derived from cloned embryos. They have already moved on to investigating the alternatives."--Editorial, "Brave New Medicine", New Scientist, Dec 1, 2001

  • "The idea of therapeutic cloning, which offers the potential of growing replacement tissues perfectly matched to their recipients, is falling from favour. But there are alternatives…So to the casual observer, it may come as a surprise that many experts do not now expect therapeutic cloning to have a large impact. Aside from problems with the supply of human egg cells, and ethical objections to any therapy that requires the destruction of human embryos, many researchers have come to doubt whether therapeutic cloning will ever be efficient enough to be commercially viable. 'It would be astronomically expensive,' says James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Peter Mountford, chief scientific officer of Stem Cell Sciences, believes these problems can be overcome, and argues that it is too early to give up on therapeutic cloning-but his has become a minority view."--Peter Aldhous, "Can they rebuild us?", Nature 410, 622-625; April 5, 2001

  • "But the idea of 'therapeutic cloning' seems to be on the wane. By creating cloned human blastocysts, some experts have argued that it should be possible to derive ES cells perfectly matched to individual patients. But most now believe this will be too expensive and cumbersome for regular clinical use."--Peter Aldhous, "A world of difference", Nature 414, 838; Dec 20/27, 2001

  • "John Gearhart of Johns Hopkins University also says that many scientists 'feel there are ways of getting around the rejection problem without the nuclear transfer paradigm.'"--Constance Holden, "Would cloning ban affect stem cells?", Science 293, 1025; Aug 10, 2001

  • "The poor availability of human oocytes, the low efficiency of the nuclear transfer procedure, and the long population-doubling time of human ES cells make it difficult to envision this therapeutic cloning becoming a routine clinical procedure…"--Odorico JS, Kaufman DS, Thomson JA, "Multilineage differentiation from human embryonic stem cell lines," Stem Cells 19, 193-204; 2001


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