Cloning in Korea
Human cloner Hwang Woo Suk strikes again: Scientists clone human patients for stem cells.

Dr. Hwang claims this was not the creation embyronic stem cells (adult and cord blood stem cells have no ethical problems):

Hwang said his method differs from that first used to derive human embryonic stem cells in 1998 and he proposes using a new term for the cloned embryos -- a "nuclear transfer construct."

"I think this construct is not an embryo," he said. "There is no fertilization in our process. We use nuclear transfer technology. I can say this result is not an embryo but a nuclear transfer construct."

The sheep Dolly, the first adult mammal cloned, was made using nuclear transfer, in which the nucleus is removed from an egg cell, replaced with the nucleus of the animal or person to be cloned, and then fused. The egg begins dividing as if it had been fertilized and sometimes becomes an embryo....

"There is no reason ever to believe one of these things could ever become a human being," said Magnus, who with Cho wrote a commentary on the work.

"Even for people that believe that potentiality is the key to personhood, these things, whatever they are, they are not people. Somatic cell nuclear transfer is an ethically better way of producing stem cells than using excess IVF (in vitro fertilization or test-tube baby) embryos."

I'm not sure what to make of ths claim. It smacks of back-pedaling. If the egg is dividing, it seems that a human life has been created only to be destroyed.