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Cloners in State of Complete Moral Disconnect

SEOUL/WASHINGTON, June 8, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Those lobbying against human cloning have been hampered by the vast confusion created by the deliberate manipulation of the nomenclature of cloning. Names assigned to the results of lab cloning have always been a matter of PR rather than accurate science.

The problem has become so acute, that now even the cloners appear to literally have no idea what they are doing. Whereas most ordinary people understand what an embryo is and where babies come from, this high-school level of awareness seems to escape most researchers creating human cloned embryos.

The infamous Dr. Woo-Suk Hwang, head of a team of South Korean scientists who cloned the first human embryos to use for research, said at a press conference that cloning experiments were “dangerous, complicated and unethical,” and that he would never consider making human clones. This would appear to be an extraordinary admission of guilt for the man who was catapulted to international fame by being the first to successfully clone human embryos, and then to be the first to create cloned embryos specifically tailored to individual adults for use in disease research.

A cloner saying that cloning is morally wrong? Dr. Hwang, however, insists that what he is doing is not human cloning. “Cloning a human being is nonsense. Briefly, it is not ethical, it is not safe at all, and it’s technically impossible,” Hwang said. “Cloned human beings are merely a science fiction fantasy. I can assure you that on this globe, you'll never bump into a cloned human being at least within 100 years.”

This is the situation created by the manipulation of language which is the work of bioethicists in collaboration with the media. Bioethics, beginning with the justification of abortion, posit that a human being and a human embryo are two different things, and therefore the creation and destruction of human embryos for research is not a matter of moral consequence.

This thinking explains why bioethicists and researchers have the support of the media that has long been complicit in abortion lobbying. The confusion and manipulation of language has grown with the advent of cloning. In the public mind, for example, all cloning is synonymous with one particular technique, Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, (SCNT), made famous by the creators of Dolly the cloned sheep.

But SCNT is only one cloning method among many. James F. Battey, chief of the stem cell task force at the National Institutes of Health, proudly announced yesterday that scientists were working on ways of creating embryo stem cells without creating embryos. “That would really get around all the moral and ethical concerns,” he said. Battey implied that the research would be eligible for federal funding because no embryos are killed.

One of the techniques he is referring to however, “blastomere separation,” is more commonly called twinning. The procedure takes a very early stage embryo, one that has divided only to six to eight cells and removes one of these primary cells, called a blastomere. This blastomere is capable of becoming an embryo. The process occurs naturally and is the origin of identical twins. It is also commonly employed at in vitro fertilization facilities when more embryos are needed than can be made by combining ova and sperm. This twinning process in the IVF industry is a form of human cloning.

The technique solves no ethical dilemmas since it starts with cloning and creates an entity, the blastomere, that may itself be a human embryo.

The world of embryo research is quickly becoming so bizarre that it is nearly impossible for anyone outside the field to identify what exactly the scientists are creating. The pro-life ethic, however, is based upon the prudential judgment, “if you don’t know, you can’t shoot.” If it is impossible to know whether a human being is present, nothing whatever may be done that could be risky. This ethic is dismissed in the research community, however, since it would put an immediate halt to all such experimentation.

This basic ethical principle related to embryo experimentation was worked out in detail as early as 1986 in a Vatican document, Donum Vitae, which examined the ethics of the then new field of in vitro fertilization. The document specifically addresses the issue of twinning, saying, “Attempts or hypotheses for obtaining a human being without any connection with sexuality through ‘twin fission,’ cloning or parthenogenesis are to be considered contrary to the moral law.”

Read Washington Post coverage:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/05/AR2005060500872....

Sify coverage:
Cloned humans 'a dangerous fantasy'
http://sify.com/finance/fullstory.php?id=13866769

HW

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