Sunday, November 13, 2005

"My trust is shaken"

It's not as though I had much trust in the ethics of cloners, and hopefully we can continue to limit the destructive research in our country. If we can't trust the cloners to follow basic ethics standards (such as, the prohibition on buying and selling body parts and exploiting dependent students and employees, why are we even considering letting them bring the technology to the US?

The old saying is that if someone will lie about the small stuff, he'll lie about the big, important issues, too. And this is the man that Time magazine is honoring for his secrecy in cloning a dog.

Gerald Schatten, the US cloning expert from the University of Pittburg who has been collaborating with the veterinarian, Woo-suk Hwang, is quoted in the November 14th issue of a Korean newspaper as saying, "My trust is shaken. The title of the article calls Hwang "dog researcher." That same paper had an editorial, "Prove Cloning Is Clean,"

It cannot be stressed enough that procurring body parts from laboratory research assistance has at least the appearance of impropriety. If the charges prove true, how many of the 400 plus oocytes that the lab has used were unethically and illegally obtained?

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