In the March 2006 issue of EMBO reports, Christof Tannert, a bioethicist at the Max Delbrück Research Centre in Berlin, Germany, presented a moral argument against human reproductive cloning on the basis of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative (Tannert, 2006). In this article, I address some problems with Tannert’s views and show that our concerns about this prospective procedure should promp...

Human cloning and in vitro fertilisation may seem very different procedures; certainly, they are regarded very differently by many people at the present time. IVF is seen as a mainstream procedure raising few ethical problems, while cloning, or ‘reproductive’ cloning, is widely regarded as beyond the moral pale. In this paper, I argue that the two procedures have more in common than might at fi...

Since Dolly the Sheep was cloned in 1996, the question of whether human reproductive cloning should be banned or pursued has been the subject of international debate. Feelings run strong on both sides. In 2005, the United Nations adopted its Declaration on Human Cloning to try to deal with the issue. The declaration is ambiguously worded, prohibiting "all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they...

Numerous uncertainties are hanging over the biotechnology of human cloning which has prompted medical ethicists and religious organizations to ask questions that bordered on its ethical considerations. In humans, issues arise both in clinical laboratory settings hence, morality manipulating genes is foremost issue among scientists scholars. Therefore, this paper evaluated technology using perso...