A story came out recently about a woman who purchased a $50,000 carbon copy of her dead cat. The Associated Press covered it in an article entitled "First cloned cat sold in the U.S."
The article is really not so much about the cloned cat, but about the so-called "fierce ethical and scientific debate over cloning technology". I have just one question for the A.P. folks. Doesn't a "debate" usually have an affirmative case and a negative case? What happened to the affirmative, guys? Forget that part?
Not a single piece of evidence in favor of cloning is offered in the entire article, but of course there are plenty of pseudo-arguments against it. Actually, there is one single quote that praises the effects of cloning: "He is identical. His personality is the same," said "Julie", the woman who had the $50,000 to burn. Of course, the personality, as an animal behaviorist correctly states later in the article, is not the same. So this single statement is just a straw man which will later be knocked down.
If we want to be really generous to the A.P., we could say that the one other positive statement about cloning concerned the potential wealth that could be made by cloning pets. ("The company that created Little Nicky, Sausalito-based Genetic Savings and Clone, said it hopes by May to have produced the world's first cloned dog -- a much more lucrative market than cats.") But the A.P. squashes that idea nicely with this sentence which finishes off the entire article: "The company has yet to turn a profit." Nice one, guys.
