OK According to this article in the Weekly Standard, even most scientists do not understand that “therapeutic cloning does not create tissues or cells. It creates a cloned human embryo. That’s the science and it is biologically indisputable. Once the embryo comes into being, there are no further acts of cloning. All that remains is deciding what to do with the nascent human organism that cloning has created. ” In other words, a human embryo is a human embryo no matter how it originates–as a clone or as a sexually fertilized egg. If you don’t believe in conceiving embryos in order to kill them and harvest their cells, then you shouldn’t believe in “therapeutic cloning.”

So my question is: how did we get to the point where most of the general public, even scientists who are supposed to know better, believe that therapeutic cloning produces a “cell” that can be destroyed or used for research or whatever whereas sexual fertilization produces an embryo that should not be wantonly destroyed or used simply for the purposes of research. Well, I heard a report on NPR just a couple of weeks ago that indicated that the reporter believed in this exact false distinction.

So my next question is: should we require journalists to get an education in some discipline, say, math or biology or ethics or something so that they know something before they start telling the rest of us about whatever it is they’re writing about? Teachers are supposed to know history or science or some subject before they teach it, at the secondary level and beyond anyway. (I know, it doesn’t always work that way, but that’s a subject for another day.)