U.N. diplomats, deadlocked for years over the drafting of treaty to ban the cloning of human beings worldwide, open negotiations on Monday on an alternative that would instead urge each government to adopt its own laws on human cloning.

At the heart of the debate are stem cell studies and other research that rely on so-called therapeutic cloning, in which human embryos are cloned to obtain the cells used in the studies and are later discarded.

Many governments, particularly those with large Catholic populations, have argued they view this type of research, for whatever purpose, as the taking of human life.

i think it strange that we send hundreds of thousands of full grown people to war to die so easily, but we are so against using completely ungrown embryos to further research things like human illnesses and genetics.

The people who went to war chose to join the military and they knew full well the obligations that went with it. The two are not in the same sphere. Cloning will probably happen, and it will change not just who we are, but what we are as a lifeform. It will likely be available only to the wealthy at first. Then if it becomes more common (assuming no problems like genetic abnormalities), it may become commonplace. One thing people must realize is that the clone , although genetically identical to its parent, is its own individual. I have a concern about foolish people who expect a clone of their dead child to be an exact copy and behave and even look the same; of course, the child won't and then they'll get angry and want to sue, etc. If the UN can define the clone as having the full rights of a human at birth, this will make cloning more humane and should prevent the wholesale cloning of humans as property. But I won't hold my breath for the UN to do the right thing. Brave New World, here we come.

The people who made others go to war knew perfectly well that the fighting would never affect them personally.

Most of the people who went to war from the United States are recruited from the poorest and least educated segments of the United States.

Most of the people who died in the war had little choice but to serve in the Iraqi army, because all previous revolts against Hussein were failures and once-promised United States backing for revolts was never supplied.

Most of the people advocating human theraputic cloning will never benefit from medical cures or financially from sales of stem cell lines or human embryos.

Most of the people advocating human theraputic cloning in the United States come from the best educated segments of the United States.

Most of the human embryoes destroyed nowadays had no reasonable chance to recieve baptism, communion or register to vote. The laws controling them have to treat them like property, because physical possession of them is necessary in expensive freezers, and their loss is treated like theft, not murder or kidnapping. While biologists can say, based on evolutional grounds, that it is ill-advised to have in-vitro fertilization available to the general population, anti-cloning forces have no such principle to forbide access to in-vitro fertilization, the source of most embryos.