Sir, - You report (The Irish Times, December 21st) my old fellow-student and soccer partner, Archbishop Cormac Murphy O'Connor, as saying: "Cloning, even for therapeutic purposes, is a new form of reproduction." But surely Dr Murphy O'Connor believes with the Pope that human beings begin to exist at the moment of conception. Since cloning is asexual and no conception takes place, why is he worried about the "massive moral implications" of something that, on his own definition, cannot possibly be a human being?
The only alternative is that Dr Murphy O'Connor has parted company with the Pope and agrees with geneticists such as Prof Lee M. Silver who writes: "If a human life can begin in the absence of conception, then it is scientifically invalid to say that conception must mark the beginning of each new human life." - Yours, etc.,
Peter De Rosa, Ashford, Co Wicklow.