QUACK EMBRYO HYBRID OFFERS “MORAL” EMBRYO CELLS

WEST ORANGE, New Jersey, June 4, 2002 (LSN.ca) – Researchers at a New Jersey fertility clinic are proposing a “morally acceptable” way to obtain human embryonic stem cells. They revealed some details of the technique, but did not explain how their method of deriving human embryos for experimentation would be morally better than any other.  The researchers, Mina Alikani and Dr. Steen M. Willadsen of the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St. Barnabas in West Orange, N.J., report that some of their embryo mixtures derived from infertile couples resulted in a kind of hybrid embryo, or chimera, that grows enough for stem cells to be formed. Destroying these chimeric embryos to get stem cells might not be morally objectionable, they said, since the chimeras were created from embryos with “virtually no chance” of becoming a baby. They said they had not yet tried to extract normal stem cells from the chimeric embryos.  In their paper, published in the current issue of the online journal Reproductive Biomedicine, they report a preliminary test to see if the chimeric embryos contained normal cells, asking the most fundamental question: did they have the correct number of chromosomes? Fifty to 90 percent of the cells in each embryo did, they report. But this still begs the moral question at stake in human embryo experimentation.  For New York Times coverage see:  https://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/health/04STEM.html