Cloning ban passes House, faces Senate test

Score one for the U.S. House of Representatives, which recently passed a bill endorsed by President Bush that would ban cloning and sentence violators to prison and fines as high as $1 million.

It's still unclear what will happen to the bill in the U.S. Senate, but the proposed legislation would ban all human cloning, including cloning that would create a pregnancy or contribute to medical research.

Those who oppose the bill said it was a mistake and that the United States was missing an opportunity to go forward with the most promising medicine of our time.

We agree with the president and the 241 lawmakers who decided that the human race is not a science experiment -- not to mention that any benefits that are being promised by proponents of cloning are still very much theoretical and unproved.

There's also the question of ethics. Killing embryos, another form of life, must be done to harvest stem embryonic cells used in cloning. For many Americans, that is still considered to be an immoral act.

The questions facing federal legislators go far beyond the purely scientific. So far, the moral dilemma of such research has been enough to keep the brakes on. But there is plenty of reason to wonder at what point morality will be outweighed by the quest for scientific knowledge and the potential for artificially engineered life.