Most Americans may not yet be able to imagine what might come after we commence the industrialized cloning and killing of human embryos, but the experts at NAS can. Accordingly, they have made their key "ethics" rules temporary. They are carefully qualified with the phrase "at this time."
"(I)t continues to be the view of the National Academies," they say, "that research aimed at the reproductive cloning of a human being should not be conducted at this time."
Both the rule that all cloned embryos must be killed by 14 days and that researchers should not breed animals that have been altered with cells from human embryos are meant to apply only "at this time."
Then there are those intriguing possibilities with monkeys and apes. "A second possible hazard is that the human embryonic stem cells might generate all or most of an animal's brain, leading to the possibility of a human mind imprisoned in an animal's body," The New York Times dryly reports. "Though neuroscientists consider this unlikely, it cannot be ruled out, particularly with animals closely related to people, like monkeys and apes. The academy advises that human embryonic stem cells not be injected into the embryos of nonhuman primates for the time being."
But there is always tomorrow.
If parenthood generally, and motherhood especially, are schoolrooms of human charity where people learn to put someone else's interests above one's own, mass-marketed medical treatments based on creating and killing motherless human embryos will be a schoolroom for just the opposite. It will teach us to treat each other worse then we treat animals -- unless, of course, we make ourselves into animals first.