Hysterical Twit of the Week: Lloyd Levine


Definitely making sure that he's addressing the most pressing problem of our day, Assemblyman Lloyd Levine (D-Sherman Oaks) grabs the cameras for a few seconds with a proposed ban on...pet cloning.

If I were his constituent, I'd surely want to congratulate him for his shrewd assessment of political priorities in these easy and untroubled times.

There certainly aren't bigger fish to fry right now.

From Reuters:

A California lawmaker said on Wednesday he would introduce a bill this week to ban sales of cloned pets, a move that could end a California company's plans to replicate beloved domestic animals.

A ban is necessary because the technology is unregulated and animal shelters are filled to capacity with potential pets, Assembly Member Lloyd Levine said in an interview.

"If you were to use animals for experiments, for agriculture, for all sorts of things, there are all sorts of regulations ... Who knows what's going to happen if these things get released into the wild?" Levine said.


Nothing, Lloyd. They'd probably get hungry and meow a lot and eventually get eaten by raccoons. These aren't genetically modified organisms; they're clones. There's no evidence that clones are dangerous, in the wild or in your living room. Any implication that they are is irresponsible.

And at the asking price, I don't think this is going to make much of an impact on shelter overpopulation.

There's certainly controversy about whether or not routine cloning is even possible given our current understanding of a phenomenon called genetic imprinting, but if people want to drop $50,000 on a new dog that's the same as the old dog except that it's, you know, not quite the same, that's their choice.

Animal welfare is, of course, an important consideration -- but we already have laws guaranteeing that. Believe me: I'm a molecular biologist. We can't so much as look at a mouse funny without justifying it to the Institutional Review Board. We don't need more animal-welfare legislation; the ones we have are working fine, and any laboratory manipulation of pets for the purpose of cloning will fall under existing laws.

But beyond the reasons not to ban pet cloning, and the joy of beating up on an ignoramus there are some good reasons to allow it, e.g.:

Dumb rich people cloning their cats leads to
--> more money poured into cloning technology, which leads to
--> more people trained in the relevant techniques, like somatic-cell nuclear transfer, which leads to
--> therapeutic cloning getting easier and cheaper, and therefore
--> our stem cell money goes a lot farther.

In other words: It's very likely that pet cloning will benefit human therapeutic cloning and disease research. So let's not even think of banning it.

We all voted for Proposition 71, right?

Posted: Wed - February 9, 2005 at 05:07 PM   | Category:     |   |   | |


©
eXTReMe Tracker