Rick Weiss of the Washington Post is one of the most respected and influential science reporters around, and deservedly so.

* Rick Weiss of the Washington Post is one of the most respected and influential science reporters around, and deservedly so. His articles have leaned toward the pro-cloning side of the debate. (An article from early 2002 became notorious for likening opponents to the Taliban.) So it is noteworthy that a recent article of his exploded a popular fiction used to promote cloning. The p.r. campaign for cloning has emphasized the possibility that scientists would be able to "make a cloned embryo from a patient's healthy cells and then retrieve from the embryo stem cells that could be used to repair the patient's failing organ." As Weiss reports, however, such "therapeutic cloning" is extremely unlikely to pan out any time soon. Scientists are more keen to clone human embryos for purposes of basic research. So, for example, researchers would take a degenerating nerve cell from a patient with Lou Gehrig's disease, clone a human embryo with the disease, and then see how the disease affects nervous tissue developed from the clone. Therapeutic applications could follow, but several steps down the line. Weiss's reporting does not change the moral calculus: We think that creating embryonic human beings and then deliberately destroying them should be banned, however noble or appealing the purpose behind the acts. But we wonder how the opposite side of this debate will fare politically when it is admitted that cloning is not about to make Christopher Reeve walk.