Bush Advisor Gets Opinions From Star Trek

"I find that there are good reasons to be opposed to embryonic stem cell research and human cloning," she said. "Both Lincoln and the Enterprise argue that there ought to be certain moral limits to the scientific project, and they help us articulate what those limits are."
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Schaub, 45, said she immersed herself in textbooks and lectures and rarely thought seriously about bioethics until three years ago, when Leon Kass, a University of Chicago ethics professor, asked her to lecture about the ethics of cloning. She knew Kass from her days at the University of Chicago, where she received her doctorate in 1991.

At Loyola, Schaub began to write and speak more about cloning and embryonic research. And she began to perceive similarities to slavery. Like slaves, Schaub says, embryos have few natural advocates. It is easy for people to treat embryos as inferior beings available for economic or scientific gain.

Instead of replacing the previous generation, Schaub argues, embryonic stem cells eventually could be used primarily to benefit the elderly or sick by making their lives longer, or would-be parents by providing cloned or genetically engineered children. While many scientists support the therapeutic cloning of embryos specifically for research, Schaub disagrees.

"Cloning is an evil," she wrote in an article published in 2003. "It is slavery, plus abortion."