Cloning After Dolly : Whos Still Afraid?

Rating:
Summary: Truth Stands On Its Own!
Review: "Cloning After Dolly: Who's Still Afraid?" is a brilliant and original work. Pence's book may be a mixture of fact, opinions and predictions. However, he has a great ability to think outside of the box, to ask questions, which once they are asked, are obvious extensions of the issue being discussed.

Pence brings a broad background to this discussion. That is reflected in his publishing resume. He is a Professor at the University of Alabama School of Medicine. His books include such titles as: "Classic Cases in Medical Ethics: Accounts of the Cases That Have Shaped Medical Ethics, With Philosophical, Legal, and Historical Backgrounds.";"Designer Food"; "Brave New Bioethics"; and "Re-Creating Medicine".

He uses cloning as a lens and as a tool to examine people's attitudes toward everything from genetically engineered foods and artificial wombs to animal rights and the treatment of transgenic animals including a chimpanzee believed to be half-human (Oliver, the humanzee).

Pence extrapolates the inconsistencies of moralists more obsessed with human cloning while ignoring real social problems like alcohol consumption and drug use by pregnant women and/or collaboration between anti-abortion counseling services and adoption agencies that charge up to $50,000 for the unaborted child.

This book may be a mixture of fact, opinion and prediction. However, no one can deny that Pence has a great gift for asking questions and framing old issues in a new context.

The reader is unlikely to agree with many of Pence's opinions and projections. (I certainly didn't!) However, the nearly twenty pages of numbered resources, indexed in each chapter via numbers, provide a rich resource for anyone to further research ideas attacked or embraced by Pence.

For that reason , this is certainly an irreplaceable resource for academics and students who are seriously researching cloning and the social/political/ethical debates surrounding it.