In the early '80s, the public discourse about AIDS was divisive and ugly. Some elected officials said the disease was God's revenge on people who liv… - Christopher Reeve

I believe, throughout history, there has been common agreement in societies around the world that the life results because of the union of male and female. Whether it's done in a test tube, or whether it's done through intercourse. And fertilized embryos in clinics are still the union, result of the union of male and female. Therapeutic cloning takes an egg that is not fertilized, and is left in the cellular stage, in the very early stages, about three to five, seven days, then the nucleus is removed and the DNA from a patient. Either male or female can be put into it. Now, that is an aberrant life form. If you were to take it further and implant it, then only insane people would want to do that, in my opinion. But considering the fact that they're talking ... you're talking about the difference of life as we've understood it for hundreds of thousands of years, versus a collection of cells that will never become a human being, and I don't even believe deserves a status of the word embryo. It could be called a pseudo-embryo, it could be called, you know, some other name should come up from it, because just like test tube babies scared people before, the buzzword embryo scares people today. Cloning scares people today, but this is simply a manipulation of cells that are not equivalent to life as we've always known it.

If I can laugh, I can live.

[A] scientist at Washington University, Dr. John McDonald, whom I have been working with says that there is no way he would inject stem cells without being able to use my own DNA for safety reasons. So without the ability to use my own DNA, without that somatic cell transfer, I am out of luck. The other thing is to please remember that therapeutic cloning, nucleus transplantation, is done with unfertilized eggs. You keep referring to destroying an embryo. I think that destroying an embryo is what happens when the leftovers from fertility clinics are thrown out. We can agree that they go to the garbage routinely. But to say that an unfertilized egg has the same status, I believe is incorrect, and I think that this is the line of research that holds so much promise and can also get us around the ethical quandary that we keep putting ourselves in. We are talking about an unfertilized egg that will never leave the lab, that will never be implanted in a womb, and that can be regulated. And it is crucial for research.