More human than human

If you want a dose of smartness on Saturday, what could be better than the Science Matters panel on The Science and Ethics of Reproductive Cloning? The 2-hour discussion starts at 1:30pm at the California Science Center at Expo Park and is absolutely free. Smart, lively Geoffrey Cowan — Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at USC — will moderate, which is a good sign. The panel will talk about hard science, perhaps explaining how you clone a cat, and then talk about implications of cloning humans. Would a ban work, or is human cloning inevitable? Would it be ethical to clone humans for health reasons? For offspring? Where do we draw the line?

And how can we make sure nobody calls the clones "replicants"? Because we hear that replicants get angry.

We can't guarantee that Blade Runner will come up in Saturday's discussion, but we imagine it just might. It raises a lot of questions about what it means to be genetically bred to be more human than human.