John Tierney takes on Leon Kass.

Hey, if Kass wants to call me a "Scientist," I'm OK with that. I'll always take rationality over mysticism.

I like his closing argument: "If I read the Book of Genesis and decide that God’s command to procreate includes using our divinely endowed gift, unshared by any lower animal, to clone ourselves and use other biotechnologies to extend our lives, how can Dr. Kass and I resolve our differences?"

But he also needs to address the concerns that the commoditization and industrialization of life extension technologies would lead to horrors like Chinese organ harvesting or Nazi medical experimentation.

But he also needs to address the concerns that the commoditization and industrialization of life extension technologies would lead to horrors like Chinese organ harvesting or Nazi medical experimentation.

Why? Do you think people do things like that because they don't understand that they're wrong or the ethics of some technology weren't properly laid out? They'll do for the pay, the promotion, or just because they're following orders. Unless there is punishment, the ethics of the technologies will not matter to them.

But he also needs to address the concerns that the commoditization and industrialization of life extension technologies would lead to horrors like Chinese organ harvesting or Nazi medical experimentation.

These horrors are problems of human nature and bad political systems, not of technology. How does taking away technology reduce the amount of evil in the world?

Tricky situation. Do embryonic clones have the same rights as identical twins? What about a person raised using an egg and nuclear material from a normal adult cell? If no one told the people who grant birth certificates, the kid might pass for a twin or a non-twin non-clone. Seems like they should have usual human rights, legal rights that follow genetics to inheritance (as a twin sibling), not have their organs harvested without their permission, etc. As for organ harvesting, would the harvested organ come from a being capable of sentience or an edited genome that just created organs minus the brain?