"The argument has been made in Congress that it is slippery slope if you allow therapeutic, what people people are calling therapeutic cloning, then you will get reproductive cloning"
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Baltimore is doing something quietly surgical here: he’s treating “slippery slope” not as wisdom but as a rhetorical shortcut Congress uses when it doesn’t want to referee scientific nuance. The sentence is built like a lab note about politics. “The argument has been made” distances him from the claim, marking it as a talking point rather than a conclusion. Then he repeats the hedging again - “what people are calling therapeutic cloning” - a small, telling dig that signals how much of the fight is over labels, not biology.
The intent is clarifying and deflating at once. Baltimore isn’t arguing cloning is simple; he’s arguing the debate has been flattened. Therapeutic cloning (aimed at generating cells or tissues) and reproductive cloning (aimed at producing a child) share techniques, but they diverge in purpose, oversight, and ethical stakes. By framing the congressional fear as an inevitable slide from one to the other, opponents get to smuggle a moral verdict into what sounds like prudence: if the end point is scary, ban the first step.
The subtext is frustration with policy-by-metaphor. “Slippery slope” is a vibe, not an evidence standard; it treats governance as helpless and regulation as impossible. Coming from a scientist who’s spent a career in high-stakes biomedical research, the line reads as a plea for adult supervision: debate the actual mechanisms and enforceable boundaries, not the imagined dystopia that makes a better soundbite than a statute. Contextually, it lands in the early-2000s cloning panic, when the cultural memory of Dolly and the specter of “designer babies” let lawmakers conflate distinct practices under one alarmist umbrella.
The intent is clarifying and deflating at once. Baltimore isn’t arguing cloning is simple; he’s arguing the debate has been flattened. Therapeutic cloning (aimed at generating cells or tissues) and reproductive cloning (aimed at producing a child) share techniques, but they diverge in purpose, oversight, and ethical stakes. By framing the congressional fear as an inevitable slide from one to the other, opponents get to smuggle a moral verdict into what sounds like prudence: if the end point is scary, ban the first step.
The subtext is frustration with policy-by-metaphor. “Slippery slope” is a vibe, not an evidence standard; it treats governance as helpless and regulation as impossible. Coming from a scientist who’s spent a career in high-stakes biomedical research, the line reads as a plea for adult supervision: debate the actual mechanisms and enforceable boundaries, not the imagined dystopia that makes a better soundbite than a statute. Contextually, it lands in the early-2000s cloning panic, when the cultural memory of Dolly and the specter of “designer babies” let lawmakers conflate distinct practices under one alarmist umbrella.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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