Ethics of cloning across international borders

You may have heard of Gerald Schatten, PhD, now of Pittsburgh, because of his prior collaboration with the University of California at Irvine fertility specialists who were accused of selling and misplacing - even using them in other women - the embryos of couples who came to them for treatment of infertility. Dr. Schatten needed embryos for research and some of those embryos came from this facility and these doctors.

Schatten had acted as the US liaison/interpreter/publicity agent for Hwang in the Korean veterinarian's fraudulent human cloning scam. Dr. Schatten's withdrawal from the project and public announcement that he suspected impropriety in the procurement of the oocytes used was the first good kick that lead to the down fall and exposure of the Korean national cloning construct.

Dr. William Hurlbut, bioethicist and instructor at Stanford University and one of the members of the President's Bioethics Council, is speaking out about the problems and "pitfalls" of "Cross-Border" research collaboration in an article by Byron Spice in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.