Word: embryos
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...someone had proposed adding Satanism to the grade-school curriculum. Suddenly, perfectly secular folks are throwing around words like sanctity and dredging up medieval-era arguments against the hubris of science. No one has proposed burning him at the stake, but the poor fellow who induced a human embryo to double itself has virtually recanted -- proclaiming his reverence for human life in a voice, this magazine reported, "choking with emotion...
...fact, any culture that encourages in vitro fertilization has no right to complain about a market in embryos. The assumption behind the in vitro industry is that some people's genetic material is worth more than others' and deserves to be reproduced at any expense. Millions of low-income babies die every year from preventable ills like dysentery, while heroic efforts go into maintaining yuppie zygotes in test tubes at the unicellular stage. This is the dread "nightmare" of eugenics in familiar, marketplace form -- which involves breeding the best-paid instead of the best. Cloning technology is an almost inevitable...
Unfortunately, the hype was mixed with a good deal of confusion. The scientists in question had not succeeded in mass-producing viable embryos from a single embryo's DNA, as the Times suggested. Their experiment, in fact, was remarkably simple. Using an abnormally fertilized egg which had begun the normal process of development by dividing into two cells, they simply separated the cells and allowed each to develop on its own. In effect, the scientists reproduced the process which, in the womb, leads to the development of identical twins...
While the public screams about the immorality of cloning research, they forget that for cloning to occur, someone must want to be cloned. Time's survey asked whether those polled would consider cloning an embryo they had conceived; 90% said no. That, more than any law that could be put on the books, would prevent the practice from becoming common. Rather than asking, as Time and Newsweek did, "What if this technology allowed someone to give birth to her own twin?", we should ask, "Would anyone actually want to do such a thing...
While the success rate may improve, at present this method of cloning does not seem much better than embryo splitting, which typically produces twins and sometimes triplets. There have been other problems as well. Some of the calves produced have weighed so much at birth that they have had to be delivered through caesarean section. Scientists aren't sure what causes this phenomenon, but they know that ranchers wouldn't appreciate the expense of having to deliver some calves with surgery. Says Carol Keefer, an embryologist at American Breeders Service: "There is so much to learn about cattle...