SEOUL, South Korea — Scientists in South Korea recently announced a breakthrough in research on human cloning. The research team has successfully cloned human embryos, extracting stem cells from them.

Their success was documented in a peer-reviewed journal, Science, leaving no doubt that their announcement is legitimate, unlike some previous claims from attention-grabbers.

Each of the embryos cloned was taken from 242 eggs donated by 16 women, replicating their DNA without any male contribution. Twenty cloned embryos and one stem-cell line were created.

Bishop Elio Sgreccia, vice president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said Feb. 12 that the mining of stem cells from embryos, which are then discarded, was a procedure “full of illicit acts.”

Bishop Sgreccia said ethically, so-called therapeutic cloning is even worse than reproductive cloning at some levels because it involves the planned creation, exploitation and destruction of human life.

“From not only a Catholic point of view, this is a procedure full of illicit acts,” he said.

“It's part of a much larger battle: whether economic profit should prevail absolutely over fundamental moral arguments, whether the survival of a human being should come first or the profits of the strongest — the industries and the multinationals that do business in this sector,” he said.

“Our impression is that this is an effort to have human embryos at one's disposal and to remove every ban against their use,” Bishop Sgreccia added, “as if they were merely merchandise or material.”

Cardinal Keeler

“I am saddened to learn that South Korean scientists have used cloning to create and destroy dozens of human embryos,” said Cardinal William Keeler, chairman of the Committee for Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “While touted as scientific progress, this is a sign of moral regress. Human cloning turns procreation into a manufacturing process, treating human life as a commodity made to preset specifications. Moreover, using this or any means to create innocent human lives solely to destroy them is an ultimate violation of research ethics.”

The ethical questions are numerous, beginning with the morality of creating, manipulating and destroying human life.

“These experimenters exploited women to harvest 242 eggs, created hundreds of human embryos, developed 30 of those human embryos for a week and callously tore apart those embryos to use their spare parts to create one stem-cell line,” said Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J. “Just as we said would happen in the process of human cloning for research, women and human embryos were treated as commodities in this experiment.”

Not everyone was so negative, however.

“Our approach opens the door for the use of these specially developed cells in transplantation medicine,” said study leader Hwang Woo-suk of Seoul National University.

He emphasized at an American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle that his team is “in the position against reproductive cloning.” He called for an international ban on so-called reproductive cloning, the implantation of cloned embryos in women's wombs for the purpose of raising children.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, told reporters, “This is the most promising research in health care perhaps in the history of the world.”

Hatch is the co-sponsor of a bill with California Democrat Diane Feinstein that would ban only reproductive cloning.

While newspapers such as The New York Times called for Congress to expedite passage of this half-ban, opponents of cloning believe the only way to prohibit human cloning is to ban the cloning of all human embryos.

Clone and Kill

Critics of the Hatch-Feinstein bill have dubbed it a “clone-and-kill bill” since it would allow embryos to be cloned, as researchers just did in South Korea, so long as the embryos are not allowed to be born and raised as children.

Sens. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and Mary Landrieu, D-La., have an alternative bill in the Senate that would prohibit all human cloning — for research and for reproductive purposes. President Bush also supports a ban on all human cloning.

“The South Korean breakthrough is being touted as if its only use would be for medical research. But the same cloned embryos could instead be implanted in wombs,” explained Wesley Smith, author of The Culture of Death.

“Moreover,” Smith said, “since the cloning technique will be published, this research has probably hastened the birth of a cloned human baby. The only answer to this moral outrage is to outlaw all human cloning, which, ironically, South Korea was on the verge of doing when the cloning announcement was made.”

“Science and technology are great human goods when placed at the service of the human person. Here, the opposite occurred,” Cardinal Keeler cautioned in his statement. “Human beings were treated as products of technology then used and discarded. If scientists will not voluntarily turn away from this abuse of science, a national and worldwide effort to ban human cloning is more urgently needed than ever.”

(CNS contributed to this story.) Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor of National Review Online.