Ah, but the science journals have told a different story, meaning that at least to some degree, the scientists have said one thing to each other--honestly describing what happened--and another to the rest of us. We see the honesty-to-other-scientists approach again in a story discussing questions that have arisen regarding the paper itself. From the Nature News story:

A blockbuster paper that reported the creation of human stem cell lines via cloning has come under fire. An anonymous online commenter found four problems in the paper, which was published online 15 May in the journal Cell.

STOP! Notice the words, "via cloning." Enough of the obfuscation scientists and media! But back to the trouble in Paradise:

Many scientists were shocked that Cell accepted the paper in just three days, especially given the scientific and ethical controversies surrounding the field of cloning. The last group that claimed to have created human embryonic stem cell lines from cloning--led by Woo Suk Hwang, then a professor at Seoul National University--produced two papers, in 2004 and 2005, which both turned out to be full of fabricated data that papered over the fact that the group had never produced cloned cell lines. The first doubts to emerge came in the same form: duplicated and manipulated images.

"Whatever the explanation is, it's amazing that there is another issue with a paper in SCNT. The four-day review process was obviously inadequate," says Arnold Kriegstein, director of the stem cell program at the University of California, San Francisco. "It's a degree of sloppiness that you wouldn't expect in a paper that was going to have this high profile. One worries if there is more than meets the eye and whether there are other issues with the work that are not as apparent."

They rushed because--despite the soothing assurances to us yahoos--it was human cloning and human cloning is a very big deal. Indeed, as I have written elsewhere, it is an ethical earthquake.

I don't expect this to be a fraud. Human cloning is here. We have to deal with it. 

Now, a columnist in the left wing Guardian notes that disabled people face deadly discrimination in NHS hospitals. From, "The NHS is Killing Disabled People:"

Each week 24 disabled people are killed by such prejudiced presumptions; indeed, there was a case at my local hospital recently. These shocking figures are based on a government-commissioned inquiry into one region of the country, which found people with disabilities 37% more likely to be killed by incompetence or inadequate care � and their lives end on average 16 years earlier than they should. The more serious the disabilities, the higher the risk.

Forgive me if I fail to join the national worship of the NHS. Mencap has been campaigning to prevent these deaths, logging at least 100 cases over the past six years. The charity blames poor communication with parents and carers as the main cause � but it has concluded that the only explanation for so many preventable deaths is prejudice. Doctors and nurses reflect views prevalent across society that people with profound disabilities are second-class citizens, their lives not worth saving. Imagine the furore if any other minority group was dying in such numbers.

Disabled people always face hurdles in being treated as fully equal. It is a consequence of rejecting human exceptionalism.

But medical discrimination involves more than a discriminatory cultural default setting. The NHS explicitly controls costs through a "quality of life" rationing system, dictated by NICE--the misnamed National Institute of Clinical and Health Excellence. With quality of life judgmentalism in the bone marrow of the system, we can hardly be surprised that those deemed to have a lower quality of life--and who happen to be more expensive to care for--end up on the short end of the stethoscope.

Obamacare will institute the same kind of quality of life rationing, over time, here in the USA. Indeed, many among the medical intelligentsia and other architects of Obamacare are all for it as a way of controlling costs--including the New England Journal of Medicine. 

That suicide is contagious is a widely held--and controversial--theory. A groundbreaking new study co-authored by a University of Ottawa researchers has found that teens who know of a schoolmate who died of suicide are far more likely to think about or attempt suicide than those with no "exposure." "It's solid evidence that supports a theory that has been around for a long time--that suicide contagion is real," says Dr. Ian Colman, Canada Research Chair in Mental Health Epidemiology at the University of Ottawa, who wrote the paper with Sonja Swanson of the Harvard School of Public Health. "I hope schools and school boards take it seriously."

Me too, but not just schools--although the suicides by teenagers are particularly tragic.

If suicide is "contagious" than so too assisted suicide--which is actively promoted far and wide in the media as "taking control" or "death with dignity." Indeed, the infectious effect could even be more penetrating throughout general society: When a state or country legalizes assisted suicide/euthanasia, the culture is explicitly stating that some self-killings are A-OK. 

If my suspicions are correct, the recent spike in suicides--especially bad in Oregon--may at least be indirectly fueled by assisted suicide advocacy--which is actually suicide promotion. In this sense, why are we surprised when an increasingly a pro-suicide culture has a general problem with suicide.  At the very least, it does nothing to abate or reduce the problem.  

First, the article in Deutche Welle, claims that the recent human cloning did not involved embryos--when we all know that SCNT cloning MAKES EMBRYOS! From the DW story:

Scientists, for the first time, have cloned embryonic stem cells using reprogrammed adult skin cells, without using human embryos...The process used by Mitalipov is an important step in research because it does not require killing a human embryo--that is, a potential human being--to create transformative stem cells.

Aaaugh! Also, an embryo is a human being, albeit at its most nascent stage. 

The Cell paper announcing the cloning breakthrough told a different story:

Activation of embryonic genes and transcription from the transplanted somatic cell nucleus are required for development of SCNT embryos beyond the eight-cell stage…Therefore, these results are consistent with the premise that our modified SCNT protocol supports reprogramming of human somatic cells to the embryonic state.

So, in a science journal, it's an embryo, but in the popular media, it's not?  That's mendacious. 

Human cloning can't be done legally in Germany:

In Germany, this procedure is illegal. Human egg cells cannot be donated for any purpose. "The technique needed to get egg cells is a significant health hazard for women with substantial side effects," says Bert Heinrichs, director of science at the German Reference Center for Ethics in the Life Sciences (DRZE)...Cloning is banned in Germany because theoretically a fertilized egg cell--the beginning of an embryo--could develop into a human being. Ethically, this is the classic moral conflict between the search for cures and treatments for human ailments and the right to life, explains DRZE director Dieter Sturma.

Hopefully, this was a bad translation. Cloned embryos are not fertilized. They are created asexually through the SCNT process--as Dolly was. Also, note the implication that CURES! are just around the corner.

The article warns that Germany better on the human cloning bandwagon!

But one thing is certain: research in the coming years will not be happening in Germany due to the country's Embryo Protection Act. However, if cloning science progresses faster than expected in laboratories around the world, a new round of ethical problems could emerge. "Of course, there will be stem cell tourism. When methods are not offered in Germany, people, who are desperate, will look elsewhere," warned Sturma.

The great cloning debate is about to begin. Just as with the embryonic stem cell debate, there will be hype and obfuscation by the pro-cloning side. That's disrespectful of democratic processes.

This is not a science debate, it is an ethics debate. Good ethical analysis requires accurate facts. That seems to be precisely what many among "the scientists" intend to deny the public.

Vermont's new aid-in-dying law, which allows doctors to prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill patients who request it, is set to take effect as soon as Gov. Peter Shumlin signs it on Monday. But most Vermont hospitals are expected, at least for the time being, to opt out of implementing it. Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems. Olson said her group is advising hospitals to take their time to develop policies for how to handle aid-in-dying on their properties and among their medical staffs. "There's a lot of work to do to get ready to do it," she said.

Actually, they should establish a fixed policy quickly: Never in our hospital! That's worked in Washington, for example, where some declared policies of non cooperation. 

More: Since the odious law allows hospitals, nursing homes, doctors etc., to refuse participation, they should do just that. Indeed, rather than help kill, doctors and hospitals should post copies of the Hippocratic Oath in their waiting rooms and publicly declare their practice or facility to be an "assisted suicide free zone." It would set a great public example by proclaiming loudly that killing is not medicine. And it would reduce the number of assisted suicides.

Transhumanists aren't malignly motivated. But the movement's ideological heart is vividly Utopian and its theories steeped in eugenic anti-human exceptionalism. That kind of thinking always leads to trouble, which is why transhumanists makes great fiction fodder.

At present, the production of live primate offspring following SCNT has yet to be accomplished (Mitalipov et al., 2002; Simerly et al., 2003). We summarize here our recent unpublished efforts in embryo transfer using rhesus blastocysts produced by SCNT with adult monkey skin cells expressing GFP (Table 3). A total of 5 pregnancies were established following transfer of 67 embryos into 10 recipients (Tables 3 and 4). Only one pregnancy resulted in a live fetus that possessed a fetal heartbeat, detected by ultrasonographic scans, while other pregnancies contained sacs without a fetus (Fig. 2). Unfortunately, this pregnancy failed to go to term and was aborted at day 81 of gestation.

The same early difficulties were experienced by researchers in cloning other mammals. But starting with Dolly, difficulties bringing a cloned fetus to birth were eventually overcome.

Bottom line: Monkeys have been impregnated successfully with cloned embryos, resulting in some gestational success. The rest is simply a matter of technique. Eventually, a cloned monkey infant will almost certainly be born. The very research now being conducted in human cloning is a required step toward attaining that same potential end with us. 

The team at OHSU, which disclosed its work in a paper published online by Cell, created embryonic stem cells by replacing the nucleus in an unfertilized human egg with the nucleus from a skin cell, then harvesting the resulting stem cells. This long-sought technique may eventually let doctors create replacement cells for a wide variety of tissues from bits of a patient's own skin. One advantage to this approach is that, unlike much of the initial work on stem cells, it doesn't require the destruction of human embryos. That practice drew fierce opposition from some religious leaders and right-to-life groups, although their criticism has faded as researchers switched to adult stem cells and, more recently, regular cells reprogrammed into stem cells through genetic engineering.

Some critics continue to argue that it's unethical to manipulate the genetic makeup of human eggs even if they're unfertilized, and others warn about potential harm to egg donors. The biggest ethical issue for the OHSU team, though, is that it artificially created a human embryo, albeit one that was missing the components needed for implantation and development as a fetus.

So it isn't an embryo, but it is?

Pay close attention: Dolly came from an "unfertilized egg" and became a sheep. Before that, she was a sheep embryo and a sheep fetus. The act of cloning does not get the egg to create stem cells, it produces an embryo.  After that, the cloning is over and the question becomes what to do with the embryo, NOT WHAT TO DO WITH THE UNFERTILIZED EGG!

As to the question of reproductive cloning: The researchers haven't tried to bring a human baby to birth. They note that they have also not been able yet to bring a cloned monkey embryo to birth. That doesn't mean they won't. It's all just a matter of technology now. Indeed,  until lately, you couldn't make human cloned embryos. Now scientists can.

The Times argues in favor of a ban on reproductive cloning, but permitting research cloning to proceed:

Still, the federal government needs to set rules that would stop researchers in this country from crossing the line between generating stem cells and trying to bring a cloned embryo to life. Adding a clear prohibition would help assure the public that stem cell research should be embraced, not feared.

AAUGH! The cloned embryo is already alive! 

Here's the strategy: Big Biotech is always willing to prohibit that which they cannot yet do. But they want authority to conduct the research they can do, which will eventually lead to being able to do what they can't, at which point the prohibition is revoked because now "society is ready."

Bottom line: If you want to prevent the eventual birth of a cloned human baby, the only way to do that is prohibit human SCNT. 

But back to the mendacity. A story in News.Com.Au--which runs stories from several Australian newspapers celebrates the cloning breakthrough because it means no embryos are used in the process!  From the story, "Embryonic Stem Cell Made From Skin:"

US researchers have reported a breakthrough in stem cell research, describing how they have turned human skin cells into embryonic stem cells for the first time. The method described on Wednesday by Oregon State University scientists in the journal Cell, would not likely be able to create human clones, said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, senior scientist at the Oregon National Primate Research Center. But it is an important step in research because it doesn't require the use of embryos in creating the type of stem cell capable of transforming into any other type of cell in the body.

Doesn't require the use of embryos? IT MAKES EMBRYOS TO BE USED! From the paper:

Most embryos...formed one or two pronuclei at the time of removal from TSA, whereas a slightly higher portion of embryos cleaved...suggesting that some SCNT embryos did not exhibit visible pronuclei at the time of examination... Most cleaved embryos developed to the eight-cell stage...but few progressed to compact morula...and blastocyst..stages. Activation of embryonic genes and transcription from the transplanted somatic cell nucleus are required for development of SCNT embryos beyond the eight-cell stage...Therefore, these results are consistent with the premise that our modified SCNT protocol supports reprogramming of human somatic cells to the embryonic state.

Repeat after me: Human SCNT creates a human embryo through asexual means. It doesn't create stem cells. The cloning is completed when the SCNT is accomplished. After that, there is no more cloning. The only question is what you do with the living human embryo you have manufactured. 

Scientists have used cloning technology to transform human skin cells into embryonic stem cells, an experiment that may revive the controversy over human cloning. The researchers stopped well short of creating a human clone. But they showed, for the first time, that it is possible to create cloned embryonic stem cells that are genetically identical to the person from whom they are derived.

NO. THEY EXPLICITLY CREATED A HUMAN CLONE! That's what SCNT cloning does; creates a cloned embryo. A cloned embryo--like a natural embryo--is an individual organism, a member of its (in this case, human) species.

Once the SCNT is done, the cloning is over. After that, the question becomes not whether to clone, but what to do with the embryo that was created through the cloning process. These scientists destroyed the embryos and derived stem cell lines. 

In fact, don't take my word for it. Let's have the authors of the paper describe it. From the Cell paper:

Most embryos...formed one or two pronuclei at the time of removal from TSA, whereas a slightly higher portion of embryos cleaved...suggesting that some SCNT embryos did not exhibit visible pronuclei at the time of examination... Most cleaved embryos developed to the eight-cell stage...but few progressed to compact morula...and blastocyst..stages. Activation of embryonic genes and transcription from the transplanted somatic cell nucleus are required for development of SCNT embryos beyond the eight-cell stage...Therefore, these results are consistent with the premise that our modified SCNT protocol supports reprogramming of human somatic cells to the embryonic state.

Media: Get it right, or don't get it at all!