by Ronald Bailey

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

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 that some Oregon scientists had cloned monkeys. The researchers say that in principle it should be possible to clone humans. That prospect has apparently frightened a lot of people, and quite a few of them are calling for regulators to ban cloning since we cannot predict what the consequences...