Federal Funding for Human Cloning?

It’s baa-ack! Just when you thought the political fight over federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research (ESCR) was over, United States District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled that President Obama’s ESCR policy violates the “Dickey-Wicker Amendment,” a federal law barring federal funding of “the creation of a human embryo . . . for research purposes” and “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed.” In response, a group of lawmakers introduced legislation that would authorize federal funding for human cloning.
Because SCNT creates a new embryo, under Dickey-Wicker it cannot be funded by the NIH.  That ban would be rescinded by DeGette/Castle/Specter.
Here’s how: Under the disingenuous title “Prohibition against Funding for Human Cloning,” the legislation inaccurately defines “human cloning” as the implantation of a cloned embryo, instead of as the creation of such an embryo. From the legislation:
In this section, the term “human cloning” means the implantation of the product [the cloned embryo] of transferring the nuclear material of a human somatic cell into an egg cell from which the nuclear material has been removed or rendered inert [SCNT] into a uterus or the functional equivalent of a uterus.

Thus, if the bills become law, only the implantation of cloned embryos would be barred from being federally funded, rather than actual cloning. In other words, the bills use a phony definition to legalize the very funding that they dishonestly purport to prohibit. No wonderpeople don’t trust the government anymore.

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