The New York Times is completely clueless on cloning

Rebecca from Mary Meets Dolly covers how the New York Times Science Desk is incredibly ignorant or intentionally deceptive regarding what "therapeutic" cloning is.

Rebecca wrote the NY Times on their misleading description of human cloning. Here's the response she got:

Dear Ms. Taylor:

Thank you for your note about cloning, a word that is used in several different ways. Although its central meaning refers to making identical copies of some biological entity, it has now garnered more extensive meanings, as for instance in the well known phrase "therapeutic cloning." This procedure refers to treating a patient with tissues derived from his own cells, not to cloning him, but the word is used because the first steps in the procedure are the same as those used to clone an animal. It was in this same sense that we used the phrase "cloning human cells."

Best,

--
Science Desk
New York Times

Unbelievable. The NY Times has officially accepted the completely unscientific definition of what cloning is.

If you'd think the NY Times Science Desk could review and understand basic documents like a glossary of cloning terms from the National Academies of Science or this summary from the National Human Genome Research Institute or the FAQs on cloning from the President's Council on Bioethics, you'd be wrong.