Word: embryos
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Scientists argue that such work could lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of everything from infertility to aging to cancer. Moreover, the guidelines would bring some discipline to the currently unregulated field of fertility research. But experiments on embryos raise the same tough question already at the center of the abortion debate: When do life -- and human rights -- begin? "This represents moral terra incognita for us as a society," says James Nelson, an ethicist at the Hastings Center in New York. "We have a huge range of definitions of what an embryo is -- anywhere from a person to just...
...they are lining up political allies in an effort to derail the guidelines. A group of 32 members of Congress, led by Representative Robert Dornan, a California Republican, has sent NIH director Dr. Harold Varmus a letter of protest. "It's Frankensteinesque," Dornan says. "What they are doing is embryo destruction, and there's no way that they can adjust that to suit me." The uproar could be louder than the denunciations last year of the two George Washington University doctors who announced that they had split a human embryo in a process called cloning...
...Democrats' health plan that have stirred opposition is the President's insistence that abortion services be covered by insurance. Some pro-life members of Congress may turn against the entire plan on this issue alone, and they will be doubly upset by the proposals for federally funded embryo research...
...corn genes in rice, trout genes in catfish, chicken genes in potatoes, even firefly genes in tobacco (yielding a plant that actually glowed in the dark). A few years ago, Department of Agriculture researchers tried to produce leaner pork by splicing a human gene into a pig embryo. What they got was a cross-eyed porker with crippling arthritis and a strangely wrinkled face...
WASHINGTON -- Senators EDWARD KENNEDY and MARK HATFIELD are working on legislation that would create a National Bioethics Commission. The 11-person panel would investigate controversial research such as embryo cloning and advise the Department of Health and Human Services on whether studies should be changed, blocked or left alone. In the past such proposals have bogged down in partisan politics, but a Hatfield aide says, "The ((recent)) radiation- research disclosures created a lot of political will to do this. It's on a pretty fast track." The Senators will submit their bill in about two weeks...