A recent Detroit News editorial inconceivably states, “Embryonic stem cell research should be allowed in this state” as if it was somehow not allowed. Last November, the Detroit News ran a lengthy article about how the University of Michigan was raising money to do experiments on human embryonic stem cell lines which aren’t funded by the federal government. The U of M was also awarded a multi-million dollar federal grant to work on federally-approved human embryonic stem cells back in 2003.
Michigan law prohibits the killing of human embryos for research purposes and the creation of cloned human embryos, not embryonic stem cell research. Legislation introduced by Representative Andrew Meisner wouldn’t legalize embryonic stem cell research in Michigan since it’s already legal. Meisner’s legislation would allow human embryos created by in vitro fertilization to be killed for research purposes and also explicitly allow the creation of human embryos through cloning and mandate their destruction.
Michigan doesn’t need to clone and kill human embryos to move science forward. That’s one reason why numerous countries like Germany, France, Canada, Japan and many more have banned human cloning for research. They also likely understand there are grave dangers in treating human embryos as if they were nothing more than mere commodities.
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