"Cures not Clones".(address by Dr. Thomas Dooley)(Brief Article)(Transcript)

Editor's note. The following April 10 briefing was sponsored by Americans to Ban Cloning. Dr. Dooley is CEO, IntegriDerm and Altruis, and Co-Founder and Former President, BIO of Alabama.

All Forms of Human Cloning Are Unnecessary and Immoral

It is my distinct honor to address you today as a biotechnology scientist, entrepreneur, and advocate for economic development within the biotechnology industry. My expertise in these capacities is demonstrated by the fact that I am the CEO and founder of two scientific companies - - IntegriDerm, a biopharmaceutical company, and ALtruis, an Internet health care company with likely the world's largest collection of health care and biotech informational web sites.

In addition, I was the co-founder and former president of Alabama's biotechnology industry trade organization, and I am very pleased at the rate of growth of economic development in Alabama's life science industry. I resigned as president of this organization in March 2002 solely as a result of my opposition to policy statements by the Biotechnology Industry Organization that favor unrestricted use of human cloning research methods for the production of early stage human embryos intended for destruction.

Human cloning for any reason is unnecessary and immoral. There is no scientific, medical, or moral imperative to clone human beings or to produce human embryonic stem cells via embryo destruction. It should be noted that "reproductive cloning" and so-called "therapeutic cloning" both utilize the same unnatural manipulations of early stage human embryos. Since human life starts as a single cell embryo by conception using natural means or by somatic cell nuclear transfer in the case of cloning experiments, cloned human embryos - - no matter how small - - represent human beings with the potential to give rise to adults if implanted in the uterus. The difference between "reproductive" and "therapeutic" cloning is merely semantic and ...