[extropy-chat] UN Delays Decision on Human Cloning

[J Corbally]

>------------------------------
>Message: 10
>Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2003 07:29:14 -0500
> >From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience at pobox.com>
>Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] UN Delays Decision on Human Cloning
>To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
>Message-ID: <3FAB901A.1010209 at pobox.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
>natashavita at earthlink.net wrote:
> > Here's some good news -
> >
> > "November 6, 2003; UNITED NATIONS, New York City (AP and CNN) -- The 
> United
> > Nations voted narrowly Thursday to delay for two years any 
> consideration of
> > a treaty to ban human cloning, an issue that has left the world body
> > bitterly divided. Facing rival resolutions on a total ban or a partial
> > ban, the General Assembly's legal committee voted 80-79 to accept a motion
> > introduced by Iran on behalf of the 57 Islamic nations to postpone U.N.
> > action on the issue. Fifteen countries abstained."
> >
> > **Now if we could have the gates open for theraputic clonging, I'd be
> > really happy.
>"Clonging" can mean either knee-licking or the soft sound of a doorbell
>chime. Which did you have in mind?

Damn those knee-licking commie bastards....

I don't see this as necessarily "jump for joy" news.  Sounds like it was 
more politics that scuppered it than any logical consensus.

Basically, this means that there's two years to convince some of the more 
amenable countries that single-genome reproduction is not 
Frankenscience.  This will take a cute clone baby being born and paraded 
all over the media, cooing and smiling to journalists.  Cloning needs a 
Louise Brown.  They had better get a move on.

For therapeutic stuff, they've really got to produce something tangible in 
the next 24 months.  Even with a Democrat in the White House next year (no 
foregone conclusion by any means), the most we'll get out of this is maybe 
protection for the research side of things.  It's likely reprocloning will 
be banned.  The proposed EU Constitution would ban it outright, in 
fact.  Strange place for banning something.  I thought a Constitution was 
about protecting rights....

Oh well.



James...

>--
>Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
>Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence