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Saturday, July 24, 2004

japan begins the clone wars

there’s hot news for all the cloners out there… move to japan.

Japan Science Council OKs Human Cloning [ap via abc news, july 24, 2004]

Japan’s top science council voted Friday to adopt policy recommendations that would permit the limited cloning of human embryos for scientific research, an official said.

The recommendations would let researchers use and produce cloned human embryos but only for basic research, said Tomohiko Arai, an official at the Cabinet’s Council for Science and Technology Policy.

this is big news for anyone who thought they had a career working on human problems that might be solved by cloning, but somewhere in the back of my head, i had a vague recollection of another story…..

ah! yep. there it is.

No sex please — we’re Japanese [usa today, june 2, 2004]

Nothing is happening with depressing regularity between Japanese men and women these days. Marriages, births and hanky-panky are all spiraling downward with troubling implications for the nation’s future: A sagging birthrate means that fewer working-age people will be around to support a growing population of elderly; a social crisis looms.

no worries. we’ll clone our way out of this problem.

and really, who better to tackle this problem than the japanese? they have a great track record on efficiency and mass production (and a lot fewer bibles-per-capita).

posted by roj at 6:09 am