Mensch tracht, und Gott lacht

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

The Terrible State of Bioethics

You read something like this and you thank God for a source of values like the Bible and the Church:

"The most radical experiment, still not conducted, would be to inject human stem cells into an animal embryo and then transfer that chimeric embryo into an animal's womb. Scientists suspect the proliferating human cells would spread throughout the animal embryo as it matured into a fetus and integrate themselves into every organ.

Such "humanized" animals could have countless uses. They would almost certainly provide better ways to test a new drug's efficacy and toxicity, for example, than the ordinary mice typically used today.

But few scientists are eager to do that experiment. The risk, they say, is that some human cells will find their way to the developing testes or ovaries, where they might grow into human sperm and eggs. If two such chimeras — say, mice — were to mate, a human embryo might form, trapped in a mouse.

Not everyone agrees that this would be a terrible result.

"What would be so dreadful?" asked Ann McLaren, a renowned developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge in England. After all, she said, no human embryo could develop successfully in a mouse womb. It would simply die, she told the academy. No harm done."

You can read the full story about animals infused with human cells at MSNBC.

2 comments:

Gloria Poole,RN,artist, etc,etc,etc said...

The very word "bioethics" is horrible! The idea that there is a way to make the deliberate killing of human embryoes for research acceptable or "ethical" shows just how far off the mark the perpetrators are. There is NO way to make reducing humans to products for human consumption whether in the form of meds by mouth or meds by injection, into something respectable, moral or even appetizing to anyone with a conscience. Killing is a SIN, and not research, not medicine, not health care. It is not a "right" but a wrong, always. I base that belief upon the words, of God who commanded, "thou shalt not kill". [Exodus 20:13]. The entire debate about stem cell research has amounted to propaganda from the groups profiting off the blood and tissues of humans. Yet the Nuremberg Code of Law that was applied to Hitler and his doctors [read the Nazi Doctors, by Robert Jay Lifton, MD] when they were brought to trial, defined the standards for human research. The two most compelling that I remember of those internationally accepted standards are that research must be preceded by informed consent of the person being experimented on, and that the research must not dismember, disfigure or kill the one being researched on. Well, what about the human embyro, member of homo sapiens--do they give informed consent to be killed? Do they have the right to opt out of research that has the potential to maim or kill them? No, of course, not; their civil liberties were taken away en masse by that ungodly Roe v Wade infamous and illegal decision of the US Supreme Court in 1973. I say illegal because Article I, Section I of the US Constitution gives only Congress the authority to create law. The US Supreme Court never had the authority to create law or amend the US Constitution.Amending the US Constitution is a process and it includes ratification by the States. Even Congress cannot do it. So there is no such 'right' as "the right to abortion" since the US Constitution was never amended to create such a "right". Gloria Poole Pappas,RN

Hunter Baker said...

Preach on, Gloria. I'm with you.