After Dolly: The Uses and Misuses of Human Cloning by Ian Wilmut

“My vision faces stiff opposition. Many people will fight any proposal to create embryos. Many will object to any use of embryos in research. But I feel it is best to say what I think, rather than what people would like to hear.”
– Chapter 1, pg. 33

“Genes are not as powerful as people think. Genetic identity is not the same as personal identity, and selves, unlike cells, cannot be cloned.”
– Chapter 1, pg. 41

“Medical advances have continued to lower the age at which premature babies can be helped to survive, so that in one part of a hospital doctors can struggle to save a twenty-two-week-old fetus and in another they can terminate it.”
– Chapter 6, pg. 201

“Since we know that a morally important person may eventually emerge (a substantial proportion of early embryos–some estimates put it as high as 50 percent–are naturally lost before term), I think it is appropriate to accord a gradually increasing moral status to the embryo or fetus, tempered by the recognition that if there is a ‘threshold of personhood’ there will always be argument about where it lies.” – Chapter 6, pg. 202

“A blastocyst can split into two (as happens naturally to produce twins) and recombine again. Did ‘life’ in such a case begin as an individual, become two individuals, and then turn into a singleton again?” – Chapter 6, pg. 208

“We are all potentially dead, but that does not mean we should be treated as if we are dead.” – Chapter 6, pg. 208

“Even when the technologies of nuclear transfer, genetic manipulation, and stem cells have matured, I am sure that some people will still prefer to put up with the random insults of nature than be subject to human intervention, even if it is based on careful consideration of medical issues rather than a whim.” – Chapter 9, pg. 275

“I want to be able to change my destiny rather than be condemned to a particular fate. I want people to have new options when it comes to that most fundamental urge to bring healthy children into this world. For me, the widespread use of genetic and reproductive technologies is not a step backwards into darkness, but a step forward into the light.”
– Chapter 9, pg. 275

So those were some of my favorite book quotes from After Dolly.

I think a lot of people don’t understand the process of cloning. And how ridiculous is it that those same people can vote on nuclear transfer issues? It’s

simple: you take an egg cell (like a sheep ovary), remove the haploid DNA from it, insert adult diploid DNA (i.e. from the mammary glands of a sheep), shock the egg cell into dividing, transfer to a surrogate mother and voila! Instant Dolly. I agree with Wilmut though, cloning a sheep for the sake of cloning is one thing – cloning a human would be pointless (not to mention cruel). There are too many goddamn people in this world! We need to figure out ways to get rid of them, not make more.