Human material

(Photo: ar )

As expected five months ago, the “results”, the decision of the British government, which gave the green light to cloning human embryos for scientific and medical purposes, caused a storm of indignation. Naive British, however, hoped that during the preliminary discussion opponents of cloning would understand: we are not talking about replicating people. Apparently, the commission of Laima Donaldson did not find a specialist in psychiatry who would warn colleagues that those suffering from neurotic fears were subject to endurance, but treatment.
However, in addition to professional tantrums, who, with any mention of cloning, immediately seem to the crowd of fresh Hitlers who crawl out of the test tubes, and professional guardians of someone else's morality also responded. The Pope took advantage of the international congress on transplantation in the Italian capital to confirm: the Catholic Church considers morally not acceptable any manipulations with living human embryos.

The arguments of the Roman high priest seem pretty good. Indeed, we can argue as much as you like that the objections to cloning are logically contradictory: the ban is to grow cloned embryos before birth implies their identity to a donor person, and the ban on using them as a biomaterial - their personality and self -worth. Nevertheless, the very thought of conception, the purpose of which will be the lifting of a living human embryo into "spare parts" or material for laboratory research, seems to be any normal mind of absurd and disgusting. However, after a day, his performance received a decent answer - in the same hall and before the same audience. Professor Jan Wilmut, the author of the mammalian cloning methodology, recalled that dozens (if not hundreds) of thousands of living human embryos are annually sent in the world. As you know, in developed countries for the treatment of certain forms of infertility, fertilization in a test tube is used. In each such case, a certain number of maternal eggs are fertilized, a significant part of which after that begins to develop normally. Of these, one is sent to the bosom of a happy patient, and the rest (invisible by a simple eye of accumulations of undifferentiated cells that do not detect any signs of pain or other sensitivity) - at best in a vessel with liquid nitrogen. Why is it impossible to use these "production waste" to save other people's lives?

The most huge authority of the pope was not enough to stop the public discussion of "therapeutic cloning", even in traditionally Catholic Italy. The secretary of the tribunal of the rights of sick Teresa Petrangolini said that "scientific research should serve those who suffer, and we are still present with ideological and religious wars." And the president of the National Association of Patients of Alzheimer syndrome (included in the list of diseases whose path to treatment should open studies on embryos) Gabriella Salvini Porro recalled that in medicine, the inhibition of scientific research is paid by human lives.