On Sun, 25 Nov 2001, Samantha Atkins wrote:
> A good heads up. If this bill is now in the Senate the good
> senators are likely to be flooded by outraged calls that are
> confused about what this type of cloning technology is all
> about. It is a good time to give your senators a call. Does
> anyone happen to have the designation/number of the proposed
> bill?
Here is the URL in the archives for my original post (on April 30)
http://www.lucifer.com/exi-lists/extropians.2Q01/3404.html
I *believe* that the bills may be tabled for this session of
congress -- but you never know with those slippery politicians.
They will most likely get reintroduced next session. Whether the
numbers will change or not -- I don't know. (I'm assuming that
these would have to be voted on again in the next congress???)
Please carefully note the (a), (b) and (c) points (and review
the bills yourself for greater clarity). While it arguably
might be nice to prevent any regulation in this area (I
perhaps can make an argument that allowing [unreliable]
reproductive experiments is unextropic). To be pragmatic
you may wish to focus on aspects related to primary extropian
agendas, i.e. (c) use of 'cloning' processes to produce human
tissues or organs.
Specifically you would want to argue that the use of human
eggs, DNA, cells, etc. for the purpose of developing stem
cells that may be used for tissue repair purposes *should*
be allowed. I think they tried to get this changed in the
House bill and failed. Lets hope the Senate is more rational.
You can expect the Biotechnology Industry and perhaps Pharma
industries to be behind us on this one. It doesn't hurt
to remind the politicians that while this industry is small
now, it has the potential to grow to billions of dollars per
year, perhaps even hundreds of billions of dollars ultimately.
Denying U.S. scientists the right to work in these areas
doesn't stop it -- it simply moves it to offshore countries
that are a bit more rational and probably results in a brain
drain of talented scientists from the U.S. (for a change).
Robert
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