Kass warns that if any kind of cloning is allowed, there will be "trafficking in clones." But who would these traffickers be -- and why would they be trading in clones? Are we talking about an army of Saddams? Not likely, since cloning, no matter how sophisticated the cloners, would constitute a pretty inefficient method of conscripting an army. No, these evil "clone traffickers" would mostly be people with fertility problems, desperate to have a child.

It's helpful to keep an image of these particular "criminals" in mind when listening to Kass' arguments. He's disturbed by the idea that human embryos would be created solely for research, but he keeps forgetting that we're talking about a blastocyst, which can't become a human fetus unless it's implanted in a womb. Until that time, the stem cells are basically thin scum in a petri dish. They are your cells, they belong to no one else, they have only your DNA and no one else's. They were never fertilized, and there is no intent to make an embryo.

Kass calls the ban on therapeutic cloning "the opening skirmish of a long battle against eugenics," and that is where the core of his argument seems to lie. Kass knows his history. He's aware of the horrors perpetrated by Nazi scientists and the tragedy of state-sponsored eugenics. And there is no doubt that we must remain ever vigilant about the behavior of scientists and the fruits of their research.

But the threat of eugenics shouldn't provoke such a knee-jerk response. Was it wrong to wipe out smallpox? Most people think the question is insane -- of course not! Yet we wiped out smallpox; we wiped out a gene that was a part of nature. That's tantamount to global eugenics. The same thing could happen to the gene for Huntington's. We could track it down and eliminate it from the gene pool. How could anyone be against that? Why in the world would the government be interested in preserving bad genes? But that is exactly on Kass' sweet spot. He believes we start to lose our humanity when we take control of our own genetic destiny.

According to Kass, it is a deeply fundamental aspect of life to suffer and die. When we try to fix this natural order, we lose our soul, our essential humanity. This is a dressed-up version of the creaky "natural law" argument that John Stuart Mill shot down in the 1800s.

Kass' theories are based on the idea that nature knows best. This is the antithesis of scientific progress, which is always trying to control nature. Those who abide exclusively by natural law are comfortable with diseases because they're a part of nature. Science aims to tame nature and cure diseases. Reasonable people will accept parts of each philosophy, but Kass comes down too firmly on the side of nature, to the detriment of humans.

The American Heart Association has estimated that 128 million Americans have diseases that could be cured or ameliorated by embryonic stem-cell therapy. Kass knows this number. In pushing hard to ban therapeutic cloning, he is apparently willing to sacrifice this group. This is an incredible price to pay for one man's vision of human purity.

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