In the 2005 Legislative Session Senator Matt Bartle (R-Lee’s Summit) and State Representative Jim Lembke (R-St. Louis) will introduce a pro-life bill to ban all forms of human cloning. The proposed ban would encompass the so-called “therapeutic cloning” the cloning technique “somatic cell nuclear transfer” (or “SCNT”).

Lines are being clearly drawn even before new legislators are sworn into office. Recently a letter was sent out by cloning ban opponents to all legislators urging them to “...work against any legislation that would ban or criminalize research with early stage stem cells derived by a procedure known as somatic cell nuclear transfer..” It goes on to state that, “Nuclear transfer does not create a new life...” The letter was signed by William H. Danforth, Chairman of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center; William Neaves, President of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research; Elson Floyd, President of the University of Missouri System; and Mark S. Wrighton, Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis.

The crux of their argument to allow SCNT is that it “...does not create a new life...” This statement has already been debunked in the scientific community.

K. Moore and T.V.N. Persaud state in their textbook The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology (7 th edition Saunders: Philadelphia 2003 at 2, 3) the initial one-celled zygote is “the beginning of a new human being,” and define the “embryo” as “the developing human during its early stages of development.”

The National Institute of Health stated in their Report of the Human Embryo Research Panel in 1994 that “the preimplantation human embryo warrants serious moral consideration as a developing form of human life.” In 1999 the National Bioethics Advisory Commission concurred in their Ethical Issues in Human Stem Cell Research citing broad agreement in our society that “human embryos deserve respect as a form of human life.” And in 2002 the National Academy of Sciences acknowledged in Scientific and Medical Aspects of Human Reproductive Cloning that “in medical terms,” the embryo is a “developing human from fertilization” onwards.

The authors of the recent letter to legislators refuse to acknowledge that embryonic stem cell research involves the deliberate destruction of human life. Instead they prefer to hide the fact that they are killing human life at its earliest stages by redefining scientific terminology. Dr John Wyatt, a British professor of neonatal pediatrics, said: “The redefinition of human embryos as mere biological material or ‘totipotent stem cells’ in order to allay public concerns smacks of semantic trickery rather than responsible debate”

It appears that the signers of this letter deny what the scientific community already knows - the embryo is a new life.