Ronald Bailey

About the author: Ronald Bailey is a contributing editor of Reason, a monthly magazine of politics and economics.

The news that scientists had successfully cloned an adult sheep prompted many premature calls to ban human cloning. There is no ethical reason to ban research aimed at human cloning. The fear that cloning will be used to produce second-class human beings is unfounded because cloning simply will not become widespread.

By now everyone knows that Scottish biotechnologists have cloned a sheep. They took a cell from a 6-year-old sheep, added its genes to a hollowed-out egg from another sheep, and placed it in the womb of yet another sheep, resulting in the birth of an identical twin sheep that is six years younger than its sister. This event was quickly followed up by the announcement...