Creating more embryos to kill

Several medical centers, including Harvard,the University of California at Irvine, and the University of Texas at Houston are bragging in the press that they are not stymied at all by the Bush Administration policy on funding embryonic stem cell research. Why there's even an "underground railroad" for stem cell research funded by two moms in New York. (How's that for irony - the act of rescuing those who weren't considered human enough to be protected 200 years ago is now compared to the deliberate, planned and technological destruction of humans not human enough, today.)

Harvard has been the site of the destruction of new embryos in the search for embryonic stem cells. However, Douglas Melton,Steven Hyman and Kevin Eggan aren't, unlike George Daley, are no longer satisfied with thawing and nurturing hundreds of "left over" embryos in order to derive new stem cell lines. (After all, that technique was inefficient and required 278 embryos to produce 17 cell lines. )

These researchers have moved on and are now attempting to get their hands on "fresh" oocytes in the quest to clone human embryos - after all, Korea's Hwang Wu Suk only had 2000 to 3000 or so oocytes to work with.

Of course, they aren't simply blindly following in the footsteps of the lying embezzling veterinarian's footsteps. If they manage to convince women to donate their oocytes, they hope to produce "disease specific," rather than "patient specific" embryonic stem cells.