No More Clone Wars?

The decision of Professor Stephen Wilmut to give up cloning and stem-cell “research” is obviously welcome. The world’s most famous ever sufferer from Parkinson’s Disease was the world's leading opponent of this “research”, held up as the solution to Park'n'Alz, but in fact advocated, like cloning, and like the ghastly creation of hybrid and chimera embryos, by people who genuinely could not care less if everyone else in the world succumbed to either or both of those diseases.

What matters to them is the dehumanisation of the embryonic human being, the depersonalisation of human beings generally, the desanctification of human life. The mere popular knowledge that these procedures are taking place at all is an important part of that entirely non-scientific project, the true character of which is philosophical, economic, social, cultural and political.

The attempt to normalise the (necessarily artificial) cross-breeding of human beings and other species is so as to entrench in the public mind the view that human beings are, as it were, nothing special. This is not least because of the obvious answer to the question of what, or Who, it is that makes human beings special. And it so also, closely relatedly, because an economic and political system which can treat animals as people can just as easily treat (or, very often, simply carry on treating) people as animals.

Or vice versa, of course. Some of the people who want this want to treat people like animals, some want to treat animals like people, and some want to do both. But all want to blur the distinction. And which people will suffer? It won’t be them. Well, of course not. As Chesterton said, wherever there is animal worship, there is human sacrifice. Professor Wilmut is most heartily to be congratulated for breaking these ranks.

Meanwhile, who is going to be on the new regulatory body that we have repeatedly been promised? Chosen by whom, by what means, and on what criteria? I think we should be told. And I think that at least some of the members should be elected by, and from among, the general public.