Brian Alexander, one of the best of the “bioethics essayists” to emerge in the past five years, helps the Times’ Magazine make a first foray by a newspaper into one of the more interesting questions concerning current and pending laws governing both cloning and embryo research: could they survive an appellate court review? Is it unconstitutional (or wrong) to restrict scientific experimentation on the grounds that such a restriction violates freedom of expression? Brian quotes Robertson, Kass and Sunstein on the analogy between experimentation and reporting. Brian tells us the Times’ editors cut his interview with Lori Andrews on her great work on the specific issue of the constitutionality of cloning per se. I wondered about why the piece didn’t mention the important FDA policy prohibiting cloning that aims at gestation; Brian says the editors cut that too.
Labels: Brian Alexander, cloning, cloning prohibitions, embryos, FDA, first amendment, laws, New York Times, rights to research