MEDIA BIAS is alive and well and busily promoting the brave new world. I personally experienced the phenomenon recently when I participated in an educational symposium in Frankfort, Kentucky (along with Drs. David Prentice and John Hubert). Our purpose was to provide empirical and moral support for pending state legislation that would outlaw human cloning in Kentucky. (Similar laws have already passed in Michigan, Iowa, North Dakota, and Arkansas.) We spoke about regenerative medicine (using cellular treatments to repair injured or damaged organs), the science of human cloning (how mammalian cloning is accomplished), and the crucial moral issues raised by cloning humans, such as the potential consequences of treating the creation of human life as a matter of mere manufacture.

We also spent a great deal of time discussing the many advances being made in using adult stem cells as efficacious and morally non-controversial sources for regenerative medical treatments. Indeed, we devoted nearly one third of the more than two-hour event to contrasting the many exciting adult stem cell research breakthroughs compared with the relative paucity of embryonic stem cell successes and the virtually non-existent advances in therapeutic cloning research.