Stem cell finding offers IVF hope

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

I've tried hard to become more enlightened, but I'm afraid I'm stuck with this vestigal thing called a conscience.

I think we'll have to clone you until it goes away.

[Papewaio]

So we should destroy all identical twins, triplets and quads?

They are all clones of each other...

A clone is an identical twin. If anything it will be less then identical due to the intervening years potential to change the doners DNA.

[Don Corleone]

No. That's my point. I don't think anybody has a problem with clones, in and of themselves. It's the things doctors do to create, manipulate and dispose of clones that bother some people.

To use your analogy, it's not the triplets themselves. But if upon reaching the delivery room, the mother decided to dispose of one of the three, would that bother you?

[English assassin]

Where did this idea that to make a clone you have to let embryos get to 8 months and then kill them come from?

Don's alien resurrection comment was not too far from the money. (See, who says you can't learn from Hollywood?) Cloning a mammal is difficult. Humans can live for 80 years. Can we be sure, even if we have got it sorted for sheep and goats (and we haven't) that there won't be some sort of effect that shows up at 40,50,60 years? No. So for now we shouldn't do it. Even if we could do it I can't immediately see why we would want to, but that is another story.

This is not about cloning though. A sperm and an egg fusing is the very opposite of cloning. It creates a genetically new individual, different to both parents, and in a way that I think is not quite understood "resets" the aging of the DNA. So this isn't cloning at all.