Therapeutic Cloning Should Be Legal, Says Medical Law Expert

Lawmakers should consider the virtues of therapeutic cloning -- the cloning of human embryos to use their stem cells for disease treatment -- before imposing a ban on all human cloning, says Lee A. Albert, a University at Buffalo professor of law who specializes in legal aspects of medicine and health care.

"The case against human cloning is strong in terms of the great uncertainty about what it produces and what its benefits are for society, but therapeutic cloning has great promise for many serious human ailments," Albert says.

"We ought not to confuse the two," Albert adds. "We should differentiate by virtue of what they propose to accomplish and what their aims are-in the same way that we differentiate between totally just wars and totally unjust wars, for example."