According to the New York Times, scientists in Korea report substantial, even dramatic progress in somatic stem cell research. But already, opponents in the United States are using the politically loaded, inflammatory expression "cloning" to describe the procedure:

Dr. Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, commented in an e-mail message that "whatever its technical merit, this research is morally troubling: it creates human embryos solely for research, makes it much easier to produce cloned babies, and exploits women as egg donors not for their benefit."

Well, I can't turn Dr. Kass on or off. Nor can I make him stop using the "c" word. He loves the word, which is becoming as loaded as "sodomy", "family", or "choice."

Notice that the more the technology improves, the more the debate shifts subtly toward whether or not this procedure should be called cloning:

Dr. Kass, however, says that cloning and extracting stem cells from the embryos is not the only way to do such work. A majority of the President's Council on Bioethics called for a moratorium on cloning for research, he said, and the council recently suggested other ways of getting stem cells that could develop into the desired tissue types and that would match a patient's own cells "without these violations and moral hazards."

Opinion polls have had varied results, often depending on the words that are used to describe the work. In a recent Gallup poll, just 38 percent of respondents approved of cloning embryos for research. Another poll, which used the term "somatic cell nuclear transfer" instead of "cloning," found that 72 percent approved.

Dr. Hwang's paper goes a step further, using "S.C.N.T." instead of "somatic cell nuclear transfer."

Dr. Ruth Faden, the executive director of the bioethics center at Johns Hopkins, said the moral debate would change if the research led to new treatments with dramatic benefits for some patients. "That could really shake it up," she said.

But Dr. Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's ethics and religious liberty commission, said his group would not be assuaged.

"We believe a cloned embryo is a human being," Dr. Land said. "We should not be the kind of society that kills our tiniest human beings in order to seek a treatment for older and bigger human beings."

I'll echo Kass's proposal for a "moratorium on cloning."

I propose a moratorium! On the word "cloning."

A "clone" is an identical copy of an organism. A good argument can be made that a stem cell line created by a somatic cell nuclear transfer (and which cannot ever develop into a human being) is not a clone.

That's because according to most definitions a clone is supposed to be a copy of the organism. Typical definition:

clone
noun (plural clones)
1. GENETICS genetically identical organism: a plant, animal, or other organism that is genetically identical to its parent, having developed by vegetative reproduction, for example from a bulb or a cutting, or experimentally from a single cell

Once again, is a seed a tree?

These are basic questions, which should not be obscured by pseudoscience, philosophical gobbledygook, or the perpetuation (as Kass clones cluck) of code language which obfuscates the debate.

You'd almost think they were debating political party platforms and not science.