A scientist working in Cambridge and California has just announced that she and her colleagues have made a ‘synthetic human embryo’. They took a human embryonic stem cell line and used it to make what looks like an early human embryo. This ‘synthetic human embryo’ has been cultivated past the legal limit for experimenting on human embryos in the United Kingdom, which is 14 days. If this really is an embryo, and it looks a bit like one, then this is a new way of generating an embryo without fertilisation. If cells from an adult could be used, then synthetic embryos would be a new form of cloning. This would be wrong for all the same reasons that the old way of cloning a person (the cloning used to make Dolly the sheep) was wrong. It fails to respect the dignity of human procreation. It fails to respect the dignity of the human being in the first stage of our development. It instrumentalises a human person destroying him or her in lethal scientific experimentation.
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