Word: embryos
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Even these uses of cloning are fraught with ethical difficulties -- not the least of which is the assumption that a defective embryo will be discarded, an action that most right-to-life advocates equate with murder. Medical ethicists have worried for some time that advances in reproductive technology in the U.S. are proceeding in an ethical vacuum, one created not by the technology but by the politics of abortion. "Congress and our state legislatures are fearful of anything that gets them near the abortion debate," complained Caplan. "As a result, we have had no systematic discussion of surrogacy, of what...
...news from the American Fertility Society meeting, he phoned Gina Kolata, the reporter at the New York Times who broke the story. As a result, Caplan helped shape the discussion that followed. For example, although Hall's technique cannot produce more than two or three clones of any embryo, several stories written about his experiment included the scenario, put forward by Caplan and other ethicists, in which an infertility clinic offers prospective parents a catalog filled with children's photographs. Below each picture is a report on the child's academic and social achievement. Couples could choose from among...
...required a bone marrow or kidney transplant, a donor could be thawed and raised with tissues that are guaranteed to be 100% compatible. Or what if the couple just feels like having a third child that is more like their daughter than their son? By thawing out the corresponding embryo they could have a second daughter who would be a twin of the first, only several years younger. A couple for whom money was no object could give birth to the same child every few years. A woman could even give birth to her own twin, provided her parents...
German officials were quick to point out that the experiment Hall and Stillman conducted -- cloning a human embryo -- would be considered a federal offense in Germany, punishable by up to five years in prison. "The Americans do not even have our scruples," complained Rudolf Dressler, deputy whip of the Social Democratic opposition in the Bundestag. "They simply go ahead with research, cost what it may." More than 25 countries have commissions that set policy on reproductive technology. In Britain, cloning human cells requires a license the governing body refuses to grant. Violators face up to 10 years in prison...
...adopt similar restrictions? That may be difficult at this point. Such research is usually controlled indirectly through the federal purse strings: the government simply cuts off funding to projects Congress finds offensive. But that wouldn't work in this case since there is no federal funding for embryo research; experiments are financed largely by private money, much of it derived from the booming business of in-vitro fertilization...