Science fiction and science fact

The clone king, Korean veterinarian Wu Suk Hwang, must be suffering from some very bad karma. The story of his human cloned embryos and stem cells is beginning to remind me of the Raelians' saga.

The egg-count is going up - currently around 2000 for the first report in 2004's Science report on a single cell-line.

As reported by blog.bioethics.net from a story in the Korean Herald,one of the research assistants/Ph.D slaves candidates, Park , is now saying that she was forced or threatened into undergoing the oocyte donation procedure. Which causes more calls for more regulations and oversite at the bioethics.net site.

There were regulations concerning oocyte donation and the world was watching. There was even an American scientist, Gerald Schatten, who at least helped translate the reports, if he was not the actual author, using data supplied by Hwang, et. al.

If you'll recall, Dr. Schatten had problems with his sources, once before. Some would speculate that men and women who manipulate human life while convincing themselves that some lives are worth less or worthless may not have any concern for rules and regulations. Unless they are caught, are getting paid for regulating, or have a political statement to make.

Money and research should be focused on discovering the ways that our post-embryonic bodies repair themselves and in (ethical) non-embryo-destructive stem cells and stem cell recruiting factors. Cloned cells are, by their nature (or non-natural production), abnormal from the beginning. On the contrary, adult stem cells are more likely to be "patient-specific." The goal should be to learn to stimulate a patient's own stem cells at the site.

Tradition has called for the use of animal models in research to prove and improve techniques. In the last 20 years, some human lives were reduced to the moral status of lab rats or guinea pigs. This time, adult women with hopes of helping the sick and dying (and achieving their doctorates) were exploited.

If there are new regulations, the place to start is with increased responsibility for the use of human tissues, including gametes that not only can be used to create nascent human beings for destruction, but which rely on the manipulation of and harvest from the bodies of human women.