Last week's vote in the House to ban human cloning is something to celebrate. It may even be something momentous. The House passed, by 265 to 162, a bill sponsored by representative Dave Weldon of Florida that would ban the creation of all human clones. It rejected an alternative sponsored by Pennsylvania representative James Greenwood, and backed by the biotech lobby, that would have allowed the creation of cloned human embryos to be used for medical research and then destroyed.
The Greenwood forces had corporate money and much of enlightened opinion behind them. They over-promised, misled, and demagogued, claiming, for example, that cloned-embryo research could one day "end …