Marc Strassman has just interviewed Dr. Leon Kass, Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics. The introductory page is here. In case you have problems finding the link to the interview (a 16.8mb Winamp file), it is here.

Comments forthcoming. The interview is about 37 minutes long, and my computer keeps freezing when I pause. So I need to make the time to listen straight through.

This is really a must-listen for those needing a primer on the matters of stem-cell research and cloning. And it’s important that the differentiation be made.

The issue is that of life begins at conception. Most embryonic stem-cell research involves cell derived from eggs fertilized by a sperm – “conception”. Cloned embryos, on the other hand, are created by replacing the nucleus of a egg cell with a donor nucleus; the DNA is entirely that of the donor.

With the, a principle argument of the Right to Life crowd collapses, in that the cloned blastocyst is no “unique”; it is not biologically distinct from any other tissue sample taken from the donor.