WASHINGTON, April 27, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The National Academies of Science (NAS) has issued a 240-page report offering what it is calling ethics ‘guidelines’ for scientists doing research using live human embryos and cloning.
Predictably, the NAS report has based its chosen form of ethics on the now-customary utilitarian Bioethics so favoured researchers who are eager to go forward with embryonic research and cloning. Committee co-chair Richard O. Hynes, spokesman for the NAS, said that a standard set of guidelines for use by the whole US research community, “is the best way for this research to move forward.”
The report fails, however, to even glance at the objections of many in the research community that cloning and experimental research on embryos is itself immoral. The report makes all the now-standard ‘ethical’ demands that ESCR and cloning are ‘ethical’ as long as donors give full consent and the clone is intended to be killed and not implanted and brought to term. In vitro fertilization, and a host of other immoral practices are accepted as a matter of course. It proposes that embryos grown in culture must be harvested and killed before 14 days have passed, an arbitrary cut-off date drawn by a group of “Catholic” bioethicists from Georgetown University. Cloning should be allowed, says the report, only after an ‘institutional review board’ has approved the “eggs, sperm or blastocysts (embryos)” to be used.
“Heightened oversight is essential to assure the public that stem cell research is being carried out in an ethical manner,” said committee co-chair Jonathan D. Moreno. The great majority of the public, however, is ignorant of the meaning of the term ‘ethics,’ which, as used by organizations like the NAS, bears little or no resemblance to traditional moral codes recognized by most religions. Even pro-life advocates are largely unaware that ‘Bioethics’ is an artificially created ethical system that bears almost no resemblance to traditional scientific or medical ethics but was designed for the use of the medical community to excuse a host of immoral practices including abortion and euthanasia.
The National Academies’ move in issuing these recommendations is reminiscent of a similar move in Canada, in 2003 by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). At that time, while legislation had yet to be tabled regarding embryonic research, the CIHR brought out ‘guidelines’ that would allow the use of embryonic human beings in non-voluntary experimental research in violation of the Nuremberg Code. CIHR head, Alan Bernstein said it was time for the research “to move forward.”
Mary Ellen Douglas of Canada’s Campaign Life Coalition said, “The problem with these so called ‘ethics’ guidelines is that no one is watching the watchers. Who decides which ethics to use? Obviously it has already been decided that ‘standard’ research ethics should be utilitarian in nature. How was this decided? By the ones who want to do the research. And the public will be appeased and ask no further questions.”