Quotes & Sayings About Cloning

While that amendment failed, human cloning continues to advance and the breakthrough in this unethical and morally questionable science is around the corner. — Mike Pence

The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be good arguments against gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and human cloning, but the fact that some people find such acts to be disgusting should carry no weight. — Paul Bloom

We can't tweak the genes of the food we eat without suspicion," Erskine added. "We can pick and choose the naturally mutated ones until a blade of grass is a great ear of corn, but we can't do it with purpose. Vic had dozens of examples like these. He rattled them off in the cafeteria that day." Erskine ticked his fingers as he counted. "Vaccines versus natural immunities, cloning versus twins, modified foods. Or course he was perfectly right. The bastard always was. It was the manmade part that would have caused the chaos. It would be knowing that people were out to get us, that there was danger in the air we breathed. — Hugh Howey

The federal and state governments should ban the use of taxpayer funds to support cloning and embryonic stem cell research. — Sandy Adams

I would not want to see any relaxation of the law prohibiting human cloning. — Tony Abbott

In 2002 scientists demonstrated beautifully just how random the process of X inactivation really is, by cloning a calico cat. They took cells from an adult female cat, and carried out the standard (but still fiendishly tricky) process of cloning. To do this, they removed the nucleus from the adult cat cell and put it into a cat egg whose own chromosomes they'd removed. This egg was implanted into a surrogate cat mother, and a lively and beautiful female kitten was born. And she didn't look anything like the genetically identical cat of which she was a clone.18 — Nessa Carey

We know have the power of God in many ways: the atomic bomb, the ability to create life in a test tube, cloning, artificial intelligence. — James Frey

I read lots of local newspapers and particularly the shortest articles in them, and most particularly any articles that are full of words in combinations that are arresting. In the case of the orchid story I was interested to see the words 'swamp' and 'orchids' and 'Seminoles' and 'cloning' and 'criminal' together in one short piece. Sometimes this kind of story turns out to be something more, some glimpse of life that expands like those Japanese paper balls you drop in water and then after a moment they bloom into flowers, and the flower is so marvelous that you can't believe there was a time when all you saw in front of you was a paper ball and a glass of water. — Susan Orlean

We are not interested in cloning the Michael Jordans and the Michael Jacksons of this world. The rich and the famous don't participate in this. — Panayiotis Zavos

Vaccinations are the application of evolutionary principles in action. If we can control the contact made between pathogen and lymphocyte populations, we can go a long way toward eliminating disease.108 It doesn't require total annihilation but rather a control on population dynamics. Vaccines are the way we use selective cloning to keep a pathogenic population in a state of benign coexistence. The process is based on evolution, as pointed out by Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa: Genes can mutate and recombine. These dynamic characteristics of genetic material are essential elements of evolution. Do they also play an important role during the development of a single multicellular organism? Our results strongly suggest that this is the case for the immune system. — Greg Graffin

Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine. — Douglas Coupland

Paul closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun. In spite of everything, it was hard not to take solace from the warmth flooding onto his skin. He stretched the muscles in his arms, his shoulders, his back -- and it felt like he was reaching out from the "self" in his virtual skull to all his mathematical flesh, imprinting the nebulous data with meaning; binding it all together, staking some kind of claim. He felt the stirrings of an erection. Existence was beginning to seduce him. He let himself surrender for a moment to a visceral sense of identity which drowned out all his pale mental images of optical processors, all his abstract reflections on the software's approximations and short-cuts. This body didn't want to evaporate. This body didn't want to bale out. It didn't much care that there was another -- "more real" -- version of itself elsewhere. It wanted to retain its wholeness. It wanted to endure. — Greg Egan

I'm one of twenty-three orphan prodigies. We were created using genetic engineering technologies that have been suppressed from the mainstream. I'm at least half a century ahead of our times in terms of official science. The embryologists who created me selected the strongest genes from about a thousand sperm donors then used in-vitro fertilization to impregnate my mother and other women. — James Morcan

I saw some women had written that the cloning of Dolly was wonderful since it showed that women could have children without men. They didn't even understand that this was the ultimate ownership of women-of embryos, of eggs, of bodies-by a few men with capital and control techniques, that it wasn't freedom from men but total control by men. — Vandana Shiva

As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country ... Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering. — Chris Bohjalian

I'm trying to grow more limbs in order to multitask at a greater rate and I'm also investigating the possibilities of cloning. Because nothing would be more useful than having multiples of me, and that way, I could do all of the things I'd like to do in the short amount of time we all have here. — Ezra Miller

Until I see proof of this reincarnation or cloning, I'm gonna live up this life. That was kinda the path I took. But I fulfilled my obligations. — Daniel Tosh

No one would want to read a book in which I explain the science of cloning because it would be very dull and it would also make no sense. — Rachel Cohn

Cloning will enable mankind to reach eternal life. — Claude Vorilhon

I've tried to imagine how she'd feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I'm pretty sure that she - like most of us - would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body. — Rebecca Skloot

Cloning interferon was not something I wanted to get into. — Leroy Hood

Humans are something very different from animals, and the numbers required to get cloning to work in animals are completely prohibitory with humans. — Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

Science alone cannot justify the pro-life position, thought it can give us the facts we need to draw moral conclusions on a host of controversial issues, including abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and cloning. — Scott Klusendorf

I have more things going on right now than I can actually do without the invention of a cloning device. It is great! — Kristin Bauer Van Straten

Cloning represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture. — Leon Kass

We're beginning to play God and get into cloning. We give up quickly. Divorce is an easy option. So why not just create your own mate? Synthesize a human being. You get tired of it, turn it off and put it in the closet like the vacuum cleaner. — Lenny Kravitz

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers. — Lewis Thomas

During this period, I became interested in how the new techniques of cloning and sequencing DNA could influence the study of genetics and I was an early and active proponent of the Human Genome Sequencing Project. — Sydney Brenner

I take the view that anything you can do to relieve suffering or improve human health will usually be widely accepted by the public - that is to say, if cloning actually turned out to be solving some problems and was useful to people, I think it would be accepted. — John Gurdon

Cloning looks like a degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children. — Leon Kass

Yeah, after making Pablo Honey, we started experimenting with cloning myself in order to double the band's creative energy. However, the experiment was a failure, and the defective Thom Yorke clone escaped. And formed a band called Muse. — Thom Yorke

In cloning, in contrast, reproduction is asexual - the cloned child is the product not of two but of one. — Leon Kass

I don't get jealous of other girls, because I was ... raised in a cloning lab to be the perfect woman for Hugh M. Hefner, so, other than the fact that my I.Q.'s probably a little higher than he would like, I have nothing to worry about. — Holly Madison

Cloning, wow. Who would have thought? There should be a list of people who can and cannot clone themselves. — Ted Danson

I laughed when Steven Spielberg said that cloning extinct animals was inevitable. But I'm not laughing anymore, at least about mammoths. This is going to happen. It's just a matter of working out the details. — Hendrik Poinar

[On cloning sheep:] Oh great, just what we need - more sheep. — Kate Clinton

Solberg; nature's greatest argument against cloning. — Lois Greiman

If you took some famous religious leader, for example, and said it would be nice to clone them indefinitely so you have a dynasty of leaders, my own guess would be that each time the cloning takes place, they would become more and more defective, presumably mentally defective and subsequently worse. — John Gurdon

We've had cloning in the South for years. It's called cousins. — Robin Williams

The people who make policy decisions should damned well know what they are talking about before they make the decisions. There is nobody who is an expert on cloning who would be afraid after seeing Attack of the Clones. — Kevin J. Anderson

Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely. — Douglas Coupland

Every day it's something worse being predicted. Mearth says that sooner or later copyright on books will be all in the past because they'll all be available electronically. She says that electric cars will replace gasoline-powered cars. She says that something called drones will be used to watch the entire country, she talks a lot about something called nanotechnology, and 3-dimensional printing and cellular phones being implanted into peoples' minds and all available careers being replaced by robots and human cloning and overpopulation and film becoming obsolete, cellular phones making regular telephones obsolete and LED lighting replacing everything and eventually she says that the planet will collapse and become an apathetic wreck," Alecto replied rapidly, his run-on sentence sounding sinister and dangerous. "Mearth says that eventually people will be able to see inside the minds of everyone. — Rebecca McNutt

Our lives depend on recognizing that human cloning, like all forms of 'playing God,' is a moral, life-promoting endeavor. — Alex Epstein

When President Clinton starts talking about what is moral, as he did when recommending a national law banning human cloning, it's time for us to lock up our daughters. — Cal Thomas

There are two kinds of cloning right now. One is therapeutic cloning which is for coming up with cures for life threatening, really, really awful diseases. Then there is reproductive cloning, which is to make a human being out of your DNA and a donor egg. — Mary Tyler Moore

Another poll, from Gallup, found that infidelity is more universally disapproved of than polygamy, animal cloning, and suicide.11 So if there were two guys at a bar, one cheating on his wife and another with a cloned pig named Bootsie, it would be the cheater, not Bootsie the pig, getting more disapproving looks. — Aziz Ansari

The bill would ban human cloning, and any attempts at human cloning, for both reproductive purposes and medical research. Also forbidden is the importing of cloned embryos or products made from them. — Ken Calvert

The way to be invisible - is to truly be imaginary. But since you cannot imagine yourself, you have to clone your imagination into being an image of yourself. Imagine that. — Will Advise

People easily believe in the transition of energy, image and voice through the air, and into their laptops and smartphones, but not in the transition of thought. And they easily accept the possibility of cloning animals and humans, or transforming them genetically, and even making hybrids with different species, but refuse to accept that we may be a hybrid of two or more alien species as well. — Daniel Marques

The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle - secular, humanist, or religious - says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not? — Nathan Myhrvold

We're not interested in cloning the Michael Jordans and Michael Jacksons of the world, but rather assisting infertile couples that deserve the right to have a biological child to have one. — Panayiotis Zavos

Elms are dying all over the place, it's Dutch elm disease. [ ... ] It came from America on a load of logs, and it's a fungal disease. That makes it sound even more as if it might be possible to do something. The elms are all one elm, they are clones, that's why they are all succumbing. No natural resistance among the population, because no variation. Twins are clones, too. If you looked at an elm tree you'd never think it was part of all the others. You'd see an elm tree. Same when people look at me now: they see a person, not half a set of twins. — Jo Walton

The nurse pointed out that identical twins were already clones in a sense, and Mother Emmanuel suggested that the soul to worry about belonged to the person who would have himself cloned at great expense when so many unwanted children were going hungry. — Mark Salzman

It's very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters. — Leon Kass

The aliens on this planet are also attempting to clone or replicate the human form artificially. Their original form, being humanoid, cannot pass the field that was established around the Earth. But if they can clone or cybernetically change their forms, it may help their designs. This is why virtual reality, cybernetics, cloning, and nanotechnology are in vogue today. — Michael Tsarion

If you think affordable DNA sequencers were a scare, or those cloning kits that made the rounds, imagine kids programming nanos in their basements, sharing their designs on the web. It would be worse than when they started printing those plastic guns in those cheap extruder kits. Who knows what they might try and target just for fun? It starts with the neighbor's cat. The next weekend, someone wipes out an entire species by accident. — Hugh Howey

Human cloning is coming. — Mike Pence

We can't even resist making antimatter, so what makes you think we are going to leave cloning technology untapped? (Douglas Parsley) — Alan Chains

There are so many things happening nowadays that you've seen in films from years ago, like cloning and all of those things are actually happening now, so we can kind of visualize it a lot more, and I think our generation particularly know that we're going to be a big part of that, we we're kind of fascinated with how human beings will fare in the world. — Kaya Scodelario

intended as a dig at my father, the enterprise being another of science's excesses, like cloning or whisking up a bunch of genes to make your own animal. Antagonism in my family comes — Karen Joy Fowler

Banning human cloning reflects our humanity. It is the right thing to do. Creating a child through this new method calls into question our most fundamental beliefs. It has the potential to threaten the sacred family bonds at the very core of our ideals and our society. At its worst, it could lead to misguided and malevolent attempts to select certain traits, even to create certain kind of children
to make our children objects rather than cherished individuals. — William J. Clinton

[Cloning] can't make you immortal because clearly the clone is a different person. If I take twins and shoot one of them, it will be faint consolation to the dead one that the other one is still running around, even though they are genetically identical. So the road to immortality is not through cloning. — Arthur Caplan

I don't believe that efforts to prohibit only so-called reproductive cloning can be successful. — Leon Kass

I am opposed to both cloning and the destruction of human embryos and adamantly opposed to funding of embryonic stem cell research. — Sandy Adams

When Charles Darwin wrote The Origin Of The Species, no one could have known that the ice cap would melt, that the waters would rise and that life on earth would have to evolve in order to live beneath the sea once more or perish. We came from water and now, with the help of stem cell technology and cloning, we must go back to it to survive.When the waters rise, humanity will go back to the place from whence it came.Make no mistake, this is not sci-fi, this is evolution — Alexander McQueen

Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here. — Nathan Myhrvold

Abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, for example, risk reducing the human person to a mere object: life and death to order, as it were! — Pope John Paul II

And what is the Scientific Community doing about these problems, young people? THEY'RE CLONING SHEEP. Great! Just what we need! Sheep that look MORE ALIKE than they already do! Thanks a lot, Scientific Community! — Dave Barry

Anybody who objects to cloning on principle has to answer to all the identical twins in the world who might be insulted by the thought that there is something offensive about their very existence. Clones are simply identical twins. — Richard Dawkins

I think we can allow the therapeutic uses of nuclear transplant technology, which we call cloning, without running the danger of actually having live human beings born. — David Baltimore

What politicians do not understand is that [Ian] Wilmut discovered not so much a technical trick as a new law of nature. We now know that an adult mammalian cell can fire up all the dormant genetic instructions that shut down as it divides and specializes and ages, and thus can become a source of new life. You can outlaw technique; you cannot repeal biology.
Writing after Wilmut's successful cloning of the sheep, Dolly, that research on the cloning of human beings cannot be suppressed. — Charles Krauthammer

If out of concern over cloning, the U.S. Congress succeeds in criminalizing embryonic stem-cell research that might bring treatments for Alzheimer's disease or diabetes - and Dr. Fukuyama lent his name to a petition that supported such laws - there would be real victims: present and future sufferers of those diseases. — Gregory Stock

I am in favor of stem-cell research. I am not in favor of creating new human embryos through cloning. — Mitt Romney

I strongly oppose cloning, as do most Americans. We recoil at the idea of growing human beings for spare body parts or creating life for our convenience. And while we must devote enormous energy to conquering disease, it is equally important that we pay attention to the moral concerns raised by the new frontier of human embryo stem cell research. Even the most noble ends do not justify any means. — George W. Bush

Cloning creates ordinary children. They will be unique individuals, not photocopies of individuals. — Severino Antinori

Why is human cloning illegal? All it is is making a certain type of person on purpose. Can they possibly be any worse than the assholes we're pumping out by accident? — Richard Jeni

Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it's a bit of both. The question must not be greeted with reflex hysteria but decided quietly, soberly and on its own merits. We need less emotion and more thought. — Richard Dawkins

The argument has been made in Congress that it is slippery slope if you allow therapeutic, what people people are calling therapeutic cloning, then you will get reproductive cloning. — David Baltimore

In early January I introduced my legislation, which, besides prohibiting Federal funding of human cloning, also expresses the sense of Congress that foreign nations should establish total prohibition on human cloning as well. — Cliff Stearns

Many other countries have already banned human cloning, and there are efforts at the UN to make such a ban universal. — Leon Kass

The pressures for human cloning are powerful; but, although it seems likely that somebody, at some time, will attempt it, we need not assume that it will ever become a common or significant feature of human life. — Ian Wilmut

In South Korea, a scientist considered to be one of the pioneers in the field of cloning has been sentenced to two years in prison. At least, they think it's him ... — Jay Leno

Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations. — Adrienne Rich

You are the strongest argument, yet, against cloning. — Patricia Richardson

One week ago I said that cloning of mammals was years away ... it is fun to be alive at this point in history. — Anders Sandberg

I've been opposed to human cloning from the very beginning. — Leon Kass

If one is seriously interested in preventing reproductive cloning, one must stop the process before it starts. — Leon Kass

President Bush and Bill Clinton both agree that cloning is morally wrong. Clinton said that he thinks humans should be made the old-fashioned way - liquored up in a cheap hotel room. — Jay Leno

Experiences and memories make us who we are, not just our genes. — Merlyn Gabriel Miller

The suppression of ecstasy and condemnation of pleasure by patriarchal religion have left us in a deep, festering morass. The pleasures people seek in modern times are superficial, venal, and corrupt. This is deeply unfortunate, for it justifies the patriarchal condemnation of pleasure that rotted out our hedonistic capacities in the first place! Narcissism is rampant, having reached a truly global scale. It now appears to have entered the terminal phase known as "cocooning," the ultimate state of isolation. Dissociation from the natural world verges on complete disembodiment, represented in Archontic ploys such as "transhumanism," cloning, virtual reality, and the uploading of human consciousness into cyberspace. The computer looks due to replace the cross as the primary image of salvation. It is already the altar where millions worship daily. If the technocrats prevail, artificial intelligence and artificial life will soon overrule the natural order of the planet. — John Lamb Lash

What we think is ethical today, we may not have thought ethical five or 10 years ago. Cloning, stem cell research? However we feel about those things today, we may feel differently 10 years from now. — Mary E. Pearson

How would I know which one I was? — Karl Pilkington

Not only are we reading life code, we're beginning to copy it through cloning, and we're beginning to write, and in the measure that we do that, boy, you can build a lot of very powerful companies in a short period of time. — Juan Enriquez

In a flash of insight, he wondered: could one use Boyer's enzyme to sever a plasmid precisely and use the sticky ends to attach a second DNA fragment? The hybrid plasmid might then be inserted into bacteria for cloning. The startling concept, if found to work, might solve the randomness and inefficiency of his plasmid transfer procedure. — Sally Hughes

The basic premise of this is that, yes, people have learned to clone each other, but that cloning is illegal. Not that it's bad, just that the law as it is now, is that if you die, you're dead. — Roger Spottiswoode