Free Republic

Twenty-five years after the birth of the first test-tube baby, an advisory panel to President Bush is leading an effort to increase government scrutiny of the hugely popular and minimally regulated branch of medicine known as assisted reproduction. The 18-member panel, the President's Council on Bioethics, plans to release a report on Thursday that recommends regulations that affect the research and practice of in vitro fertilization, according to several people familiar with the final version. Surprisingly, the report includes recommendations for legislation to govern embryo research that could, if adopted, break the impasse over human cloning and stem cell research,...

A rose is a rose is a rose, even if — like many commercial plants — it is essentially a clone. But is a normal human blastocyst, a microscopic bubble of proto-life that forms about five days after sperm meets egg, the same as a cloned blastocyst? That may seem an arcane technical question in the debate about human cloning, reignited last week with the announcement by South Korean scientists that they had cloned a human embryo and harvested embryonic stem cells from it. But scientists, politicians and bioethicists have been grappling for years with the biological and moral subtleties...