A few years back, I worked on a radio series for PRI's The World. The series was called The Global Race for Stem Cell Therapies,and it tried to take listeners on a wild joy-ride into the murky scientific and ethical quandries surrounding work on human embryos. I didn't actually know much about stem cell science when I started working on the series, but it didn't take long before I realized that you can't talk about stem cells without talking about therapeutic cloning. And from there, for critics of stem cell science, it was often a short jump to a discussion of cloning entire humans. One of the most mind-blowing things I learned while reporting the series was this: there is no law in the United States that outright bans the cloning of entire human beings. Such bans do exist in other countries around the world, but not here. In fact, both supporters and detractors of stem cell research in the United States pointed out the sheer lack of regulation in America when it comes to these matters.
Not so in Britain, where a special statutory body called The Human Fertility and Embryology Authority regulates and licenses all work involving human embryos, including matters that involve cloning. So, here's my podcast for this week: it's the longish piece I did from the UK on the HFEA, which as you will hear at the beginning, kind of sounds slightly Brave New World...
(Image from Wikimedia Commons. It's of an human embryonic stem (hES) cell colony on a mouse embryonic fibroblast (MEF) feeder layer.)
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