> You know as well as I, that somebody, somewhere will be cloning children not for childless parents, but to build a private army, or something like that. This, I fear, would be the most abused technology in the history of the world.

Why would somebody do this? Cloning is way more expensive and complex than just creating people the old fashioned way. It seems to me that if you want an army, just recruit the incredible number of youth from third world countries that would jump at the chance for you to feed them. If you have the money to clone an army, you definitely have the money to hire one.

I really don't see HOW cloning can be abused. All you are doing is getting a genetic copy of a person. You still need a mother to carry the embryo to term, and then you need to go through all the hassle of raising it.

People always seem to fear that we'll treat clones differently than we do real people, but I think that's bogus. Has there been any stigmata against people created via in-vitro fertilization? It's not like clones will go around with a big red "C" on their foreheads to identify themselves. Clones will function EXACTLY like ordinary people (because they are!), and as such I don't see them being targeted for horrific experiments. And until we can start growing people in large vats, mass producing people via cloning isn't a reality.

Stephen