Politics & Power Quote by David Baltimore

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.