A newborn baby was flushed down a toilet in China, but luckily saved. From the Telegraph story:

The abandoned two-day-old child was discovered on Saturday afternoon in Jinhua, a city in the eastern province of Zhejiang, after the residents of a tower block reported hearing crying.Unable to pull the baby free, fire fighters were forced to saw off a four-inch wide piece of piping from the floor below and then take the baby to hospital while still inside the pipe.

The five pound baby boy was finally extracted from the pipe after nearly an hour, according to a local news website. Chinese television showed white-gloved hospital staff using a pair of red pliers and a yellow saw to pull open the pipe. Inside was a tiny baby, filthy and terrified but alive.

This ugliness is probably a consequence of China’s tyrannous one-child policy:

Cases of abandoned babies are common in China with young mothers and strict family planning rules often blamed for the phenomenon. But Saturday’s highly unusual case provoked a furious response on Chinese social media sites with hundreds of thousands of comments posted this week. The parents who did this have hearts even filthier than that sewage pipe,” wrote one user of the Twitter-like Weibo. Other abandoned babies are not so lucky. On May 22 another child was found in a dustbin in Hebei province, wrapped in a pink cloth and badly bruised.

It strikes me that the symbolism of this story captures the zeitgeist of the times. There is a war against the sanctity of life of babies out there. Think late term abortion justified by Planned Parenthood, to the point that a Florida official even asserted that saving a baby that survived a botched abortion should be up to the mother and doctor. Think Gosnell. Think late-term abortionists given a standing O at the Sundance Film Festival. Think “after-birth abortion” advocacy and the denial of the personhood of infants by the ilk of Princeton’s Peter Singer. Thank advocacy for a right to a dead fetus. Think radical environmentalists’ extreme Malthusianism, with some warming hysterics calling for universal China-type population policies to “save the planet.”

Do most people believe that fetuses and babies are the moral equivalent of solid waste? Of course not. But too many sure talk as if they do.

China has an evil one-child policy–often extolled by the Malthusians among radical environmentalists and global warming hysterics as a needed authoritarian action to “save the planet.” Now, we see the tyranny of Myanmar imposing a two-child limit–but only against the nation’s Muslims. From the NYT story:

The local authorities in the western state of Rakhine in Myanmar have imposed a two-child limit for Muslim Rohingya families, a policy that does not apply to Buddhists in the area and comes amid accusations of ethnic cleansing during earlier sectarian violence. Officials said Saturday that the new measure would be applied to two Rakhine townships that border Bangladesh and that have the highest Muslim populations in the state.

The unusual order makes Myanmar perhaps the only country in the world to impose such a restriction on a religious group, and it is likely to fuel further criticism that Muslims are being discriminated against in the Buddhist-majority country.

Ever since the Population Bomb warned incorrectly that we are doomed due to over-breeding, Deep Ecologists and their anti-human ilk and progeny have yearned for forced population control. The “villain”–perhaps really the hero of Dan Brown’s new novel, Inferno–seeks to spread a virus that will make 1/3 of the world involuntarily infertile, and I would bet that many on the Left would applaud if such a thing could actually be done. But this is the first case I have heard of forced population control as a form of religious persecution. Not good. Not good at all. 

Society’s acceptance of assisted suicide’s ideology eventually will lead, I predict, to a right to help being made dead for any adult with more than a transitory desire to die–and for any reason. After all, assisted suicide ideology couples radical personal autonomy and total body ownership with a view that killing is an acceptable answer to suffering. Moreover,”suffering” is seen as an entirely subjective concept, meaning it is whatever the sufferer says it is. No judgment allowed.

That being so, how can a “right to be made dead” be limited to the terminally ill, the catastrophically disabled, or indeed, even those experiencing measurable physical symptoms? It can’t. Thus, in Belgium, we have seen a joint euthanasia of an elderly couple who didn’t want to be separated. Ditto, Switzerland. In the Netherlands, a growing number of people with mental illnesses and the aged “tired of life” are being voluntarily killed or assisted in suicide by doctors. Indeed, Netherlander doctors are allowed by an ethics opinion from the Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) to teach patients, who are not legally qualified for euthanasia, how to do the deed themselves!

In Switzerland, a healthy woman who didn’t want to experience the decline of aging but was actually denied assisted suicide, has sued, claiming a doctor should be forced to prescribe for her. The court didn’t do that, but it has ordered the country to create more clarity in its laws about who has the legal right to help being made dead. From the Washington Post story:

The vagueness of Swiss laws “concerning a particularly important aspect of her life was likely to have caused Ms. Gross a considerable degree of anguish,” the court found. And while Swiss laws allow for the possibility of obtaining a lethal dose of a drug on medical prescription, it added, those laws “did not provide sufficient guidelines ensuring clarity as to the extent of this right.”

Note: The absence of clear guidelines was seen as a cause of anguish. That point could easily be read to mean, not having access to suicide itself is an unacceptable cause of suffering–particularly as many non terminally ill people commit assisted suicide at the Swiss clinics already.

If history is any guide, the legal “clarity” will move Switzerland toward even greater ease in accessing assisted suicide than already exists–perhaps even for the unquestionably healthy:

The court said it recognized the issue is a difficult one, but that more specific Swiss laws would help doctors make better informed decisions free of fear of litigation or bad publicity. The Swiss government said in 2010 that sodium pentobarbital could be used in exceptional cases for severe psychological illness.

A year later, the Swiss government dropped plans to impose stricter rules regarding “passive assisted suicide.” The government said the current rules strike a balance between protecting vulnerable individuals and safeguarding their right to self-determination, and new laws could infringe on people’s personal freedoms.

Note where the focus lies–on the first pillar of assisted suicide advocacy. Thus, even though the court didn’t say that Switzerland had to liberalize the law, that is what I predict law makers will do, rather than impose any meaningful restrictions. More liberality equals less protection, equals another big step toward death-on-demand. But that’s what happens in a culture of death. 

India has been long been an international center of biological colonialism, including a shameful industry in surrogate motherhood, in which desperate destitute women sell their gestational capacities–occasionally at the cost of their lives. Now, a bill (SB 162) has overwhelmingly passed the Louisiana Legislature that will bring biological colonialism to the Pelican State by establishing an industry in surrogate motherhood. Hmm. Perhaps they should change the state’s moniker to the Stork State. 

Of course, the term “surrogate mother” has long gone out of fashion in the powerful infertility industry. Rather, women who give birth to others’ children are known by the dehumanizing terms of “gestational carrier” or “gestational surrogate,” which makes me think “brood mare” every time I see it.

In any event, “genetic surrogacy” would remain outlawed–that is a mother agreeing to carry her own child for money to be given to others. But “gestational surrogacy,” in which a woman is impregnated with the biological embryo of others, would become a legal Louisiana industry. And guess which women would (mostly) be desperate enough to carry babies for others, to be compensated for things like living expenses and costs of travel? It sure won’t be the professional classes, the people most likely to rent the wombs!

Kathleen Parker has a good column raising some pertinent objections. From, “Surrogacy Exposed:”

There is a dark underbelly to the surrogacy industry–and it is a business–including a burgeoning industry that preys on vulnerable women, commodifying them as “ovens”–a term Smith himself used. Never mind repercussions for the children themselves, who may have as many as five “parents”–from the egg and sperm donors, to the woman who carries them to the couple or single parent who adopts them…

The simplicity of the human desire for children notwithstanding, there’s nothing simple about the surrogacy business–and we haven’t scraped the surface of the metaphysical, spiritual, emotional and psychological issues with which a brief flirtation evokes mind-twisting complexities. Physical concerns, meanwhile, are plentiful.

Indeed. It used to that women were commodified primarily for their sexual functions and features. Today, their reproductive parts and biological functions are being turned into natural resources to be exploited by those who can pay the tab. 

Parker’s conclusion nails it:

While no one wishes to cause pain to people who, for whatever reason, can’t have a child on their own, there are more compelling principles and consequences in play. Human babies are not things; their mothers are not ovens. But bartering and selling babies-to-order sure make them seem that way. By turning the miracle of life into a profit-driven, state-regulated industry, the stork begins to resemble a vulture.

Think of all the children out there just begging for adoption. Governor Jindal. Veto!

The New York Times ran a powerful op/ed this week, written by a Chinese novelist, detailing the brutality of the the country’s one-child policy. From the piece by Ma Jian:

Village family-planning officers vigilantly chart the menstrual cycle and pelvic-exam results of every woman of childbearing age in their area. If a woman gets pregnant without permission and is unable to pay the often exorbitant fine for violating the policy, she risks being subjected to a forced abortion. According to Chinese Health Ministry data released in March, 336 million abortions and 222 million sterilizations have been carried out since 1971. (Though the one-child policy was introduced in 1979, other, less-stringent family planning policies were in place before it.)

These figures are easy to quote, but they fail to convey the magnitude of the horror faced by rural Chinese women. During a long journey through the hinterlands of southwest China in 2009, I was able to find some of the faces behind these numbers. On ramshackle barges moored on the remote waterways of Hubei and Guangxi, I met hundreds of “family-planning fugitives”– couples who’d fled their villages to give birth to an unauthorized second or third child in neighboring provinces. Almost every one of the pregnant women I spoke to had suffered a mandatory abortion. One woman told me how, when she was eight months pregnant with an illegal second child and was unable to pay the 20,000 yuan fine (about $3,200), family planning officers dragged her to the local clinic, bound her to a surgical table and injected a lethal drug into her abdomen…

It is not surprising that China has the highest rate of female suicide in the world. The one-child policy has reduced women to numbers, objects, a means of production; it has denied them control of their bodies and the basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children. Baby girls are also victims of the policy. Under family pressure to ensure that their only child is a son, women often choose to abort baby girls or discard them at birth, practices that have skewed China’s sex ratio to 118 boys for every 100 girls.

This should make China a pariah. But there’s money to be made and cheap labor aplenty.

We all participate whenever we buy goods made in China–which one is virtually forced to do these days. I’m not sure what we an do other than weave our own clothes and give up cell phones. And even then, we all buy things we don’t need because we want them. Guilty as charged!  But if I can buy something not made in China, I always do so even if it means a higher price. 

But that doesn’t excuse the Malthusian radical environmentalists and global warming hysterics who have urged that the West adopt such policies to “save the planet.” That is anti-human.

The mainstream media–under the influence of spin from “the scientists”–has been playing a game of hide-the-ball about the recent first human cloning success. For example, the LA Times threw a lot of dirt in the air by calling the success merely an “incremental step” toward human cloning. No. It. Was. Human Cloning. Many stories also reported falsely that eggs were turned directly into embryonic stem cells–omitting the ethically controversial steps in which cloned embryos were created and then destroyed for the cells. Ignorance or bias? Both, says I.

Ah, but the science journals have told a different story, meaning that at least to some degree, the scientists have said one thing to each other–honestly describing what happened–and another to the rest of us. We see the honesty-to-other-scientists approach again in a story discussing questions that have arisen regarding the paper itself. From the Nature News story:

A blockbuster paper that reported the creation of human stem cell lines via cloning has come under fire. An anonymous online commenter found four problems in the paper, which was published online 15 May in the journal Cell.

STOP! Notice the words, “via cloning.” Enough of the obfuscation scientists and media! But back to the trouble in Paradise:

Many scientists were shocked that Cell accepted the paper in just three days, especially given the scientific and ethical controversies surrounding the field of cloning. The last group that claimed to have created human embryonic stem cell lines from cloning–led by Woo Suk Hwang, then a professor at Seoul National University–produced two papers, in 2004 and 2005, which both turned out to be full of fabricated data that papered over the fact that the group had never produced cloned cell lines. The first doubts to emerge came in the same form: duplicated and manipulated images.

“Whatever the explanation is, it’s amazing that there is another issue with a paper in SCNT. The four-day review process was obviously inadequate,” says Arnold Kriegstein, director of the stem cell program at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s a degree of sloppiness that you wouldn’t expect in a paper that was going to have this high profile. One worries if there is more than meets the eye and whether there are other issues with the work that are not as apparent.”

They rushed because–despite the soothing assurances to us yahoos–it was human cloning and human cloning is a very big deal. Indeed, as I have written elsewhere, it is an ethical earthquake.

I don’t expect this to be a fraud. Human cloning is here. We have to deal with it. 

I keep saying that if you want to see what the USA will look like in ten years under Obamacare, just look at the mess that calls itself the National Health Service in the UK. It isn’t that the NHS is socialized medicine per se–although that is part of it. More importantly in my view, the NHS has a sclerotic and bureaucratic top-down approach to healthcare that deprofessionalizes medicine by dictating treatment protocols from on high.

Now, a columnist in the left wing Guardian notes that disabled people face deadly discrimination in NHS hospitals. From, “The NHS is Killing Disabled People:”

Each week 24 disabled people are killed by such prejudiced presumptions; indeed, there was a case at my local hospital recently. These shocking figures are based on a government-commissioned inquiry into one region of the country, which found people with disabilities 37% more likely to be killed by incompetence or inadequate care � and their lives end on average 16 years earlier than they should. The more serious the disabilities, the higher the risk.

Forgive me if I fail to join the national worship of the NHS. Mencap has been campaigning to prevent these deaths, logging at least 100 cases over the past six years. The charity blames poor communication with parents and carers as the main cause � but it has concluded that the only explanation for so many preventable deaths is prejudice. Doctors and nurses reflect views prevalent across society that people with profound disabilities are second-class citizens, their lives not worth saving. Imagine the furore if any other minority group was dying in such numbers.

Disabled people always face hurdles in being treated as fully equal. It is a consequence of rejecting human exceptionalism.

But medical discrimination involves more than a discriminatory cultural default setting. The NHS explicitly controls costs through a ”quality of life” rationing system, dictated by NICE–the misnamed National Institute of Clinical and Health Excellence. With quality of life judgmentalism in the bone marrow of the system, we can hardly be surprised that those deemed to have a lower quality of life–and who happen to be more expensive to care for–end up on the short end of the stethoscope.

Obamacare will institute the same kind of quality of life rationing, over time, here in the USA. Indeed, many among the medical intelligentsia and other architects of Obamacare are all for it as a way of controlling costs–including the New England Journal of Medicine. 

One suicide begets another, a study in Canada has demonstrated. From the Ottawa Citizen story:

That suicide is contagious is a widely held–and controversial–theory. A groundbreaking new study co-authored by a University of Ottawa researchers has found that teens who know of a schoolmate who died of suicide are far more likely to think about or attempt suicide than those with no “exposure.” ”It’s solid evidence that supports a theory that has been around for a long time–that suicide contagion is real,” says Dr. Ian Colman, Canada Research Chair in Mental Health Epidemiology at the University of Ottawa, who wrote the paper with Sonja Swanson of the Harvard School of Public Health. “I hope schools and school boards take it seriously.”

Me too, but not just schools–although the suicides by teenagers are particularly tragic.

If suicide is “contagious” than so too assisted suicide–which is actively promoted far and wide in the media as “taking control” or “death with dignity.” Indeed, the infectious effect could even be more penetrating throughout general society: When a state or country legalizes assisted suicide/euthanasia, the culture is explicitly stating that some self-killings are A-OK. 

If my suspicions are correct, the recent spike in suicides–especially bad in Oregon–may at least be indirectly fueled by assisted suicide advocacy–which is actually suicide promotion. In this sense, why are we surprised when an increasingly a pro-suicide culture has a general problem with suicide.  At the very least, it does nothing to abate or reduce the problem.  

I just read an article that is a clear call for Germany to get in on the human cloning game. And as so often happens in this issue, it is filled with scientific inaccuracies–whether by intent or ignorance, I don’t know.

First, the article in Deutche Welle, claims that the recent human cloning did not involved embryos–when we all know that SCNT cloning MAKES EMBRYOS! From the DW story:

Scientists, for the first time, have cloned embryonic stem cells using reprogrammed adult skin cells, without using human embryos…The process used by Mitalipov is an important step in research because it does not require killing a human embryo–that is, a potential human being–to create transformative stem cells.

Aaaugh! Also, an embryo is a human being, albeit at its most nascent stage. 

The Cell paper announcing the cloning breakthrough told a different story:

Activation of embryonic genes and transcription from the transplanted somatic cell nucleus are required for development of SCNT embryos beyond the eight-cell stage…Therefore, these results are consistent with the premise that our modified SCNT protocol supports reprogramming of human somatic cells to the embryonic state.

So, in a science journal, it’s an embryo, but in the popular media, it’s not?  That’s mendacious. 

Human cloning can’t be done legally in Germany:

In Germany, this procedure is illegal. Human egg cells cannot be donated for any purpose. “The technique needed to get egg cells is a significant health hazard for women with substantial side effects,” says Bert Heinrichs, director of science at the German Reference Center for Ethics in the Life Sciences (DRZE)…Cloning is banned in Germany because theoretically a fertilized egg cell–the beginning of an embryo–could develop into a human being. Ethically, this is the classic moral conflict between the search for cures and treatments for human ailments and the right to life, explains DRZE director Dieter Sturma.

Hopefully, this was a bad translation. Cloned embryos are not fertilized. They are created asexually through the SCNT process–as Dolly was. Also, note the implication that CURES! are just around the corner.

The article warns that Germany better on the human cloning bandwagon!

But one thing is certain: research in the coming years will not be happening in Germany due to the country’s Embryo Protection Act. However, if cloning science progresses faster than expected in laboratories around the world, a new round of ethical problems could emerge. “Of course, there will be stem cell tourism. When methods are not offered in Germany, people, who are desperate, will look elsewhere,” warned Sturma.

The great cloning debate is about to begin. Just as with the embryonic stem cell debate, there will be hype and obfuscation by the pro-cloning side. That’s disrespectful of democratic processes.

This is not a science debate, it is an ethics debate. Good ethical analysis requires accurate facts. That seems to be precisely what many among “the scientists” intend to deny the public.

Vermont has legalized assisted suicide, and hospitals in the state are delaying implementation on premises. From the AP story:

Vermont’s new aid-in-dying law, which allows doctors to prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill patients who request it, is set to take effect as soon as Gov. Peter Shumlin signs it on Monday. But most Vermont hospitals are expected, at least for the time being, to opt out of implementing it. Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems. Olson said her group is advising hospitals to take their time to develop policies for how to handle aid-in-dying on their properties and among their medical staffs. “There’s a lot of work to do to get ready to do it,” she said.

Actually, they should establish a fixed policy quickly: Never in our hospital! That’s worked in Washington, for example, where some declared policies of non cooperation. 

More: Since the odious law allows hospitals, nursing homes, doctors etc., to refuse participation, they should do just that. Indeed, rather than help kill, doctors and hospitals should post copies of the Hippocratic Oath in their waiting rooms and publicly declare their practice or facility to be an “assisted suicide free zone.” It would set a great public example by proclaiming loudly that killing is not medicine. And it would reduce the number of assisted suicides.

I hear that the villain in Dan Brown’s new novel, Inferno, is a Malthusian transhumanist. Brown isn’t the first to use fiction to explore the potential downside of the transhumanist movement. The Frankenstein series by my pal Dean Koontz, for example, is all about transhumanism–as indeed, when you think about it, was Mary Shelly’s original. The great Star Trek villain Kahn was the creation of transhumanist genetic engineering gone bad. And of course, Huxley’s immortal (pun intended) Brave New World is the classic of the genre.

Transhumanists aren’t malignly motivated. But the movement’s ideological heart is vividly Utopian and its theories steeped in eugenic anti-human exceptionalism. That kind of thinking always leads to trouble, which is why transhumanists makes great fiction fodder.

Thanks to Brendan P. Foht, over at The Corner, for showing that it was misleading to claim that SCNT human cloning could not lead to a human pregnancy because there have been no successful cloned monkey pregnancies. But there have been cloned monkey pregnancies, with one embryo developing to the fetal stage with a heartbeat! From the 2010 article in the International Journal of Biological Development:

At present, the production of live primate offspring following SCNT has yet to be accomplished (Mitalipov et al., 2002; Simerly et al., 2003). We summarize here our recent unpublished efforts in embryo transfer using rhesus blastocysts produced by SCNT with adult monkey skin cells expressing GFP (Table 3). A total of 5 pregnancies were established following transfer of 67 embryos into 10 recipients (Tables 3 and 4). Only one pregnancy resulted in a live fetus that possessed a fetal heartbeat, detected by ultrasonographic scans, while other pregnancies contained sacs without a fetus (Fig. 2). Unfortunately, this pregnancy failed to go to term and was aborted at day 81 of gestation.

The same early difficulties were experienced by researchers in cloning other mammals. But starting with Dolly, difficulties bringing a cloned fetus to birth were eventually overcome.

Bottom line: Monkeys have been impregnated successfully with cloned embryos, resulting in some gestational success. The rest is simply a matter of technique. Eventually, a cloned monkey infant will almost certainly be born. The very research now being conducted in human cloning is a required step toward attaining that same potential end with us. 

The LA Times has waded in to the junk biology game, assuring us that no embryos are threatened in human cloning–WHEN THE WHOLE POINT OF HUMAN CLONING IS TO CREATE AN EMBRYO!  From the editorial, “The Specter of Human Cloning:”

The team at OHSU, which disclosed its work in a paper published online by Cell, created embryonic stem cells by replacing the nucleus in an unfertilized human egg with the nucleus from a skin cell, then harvesting the resulting stem cells. This long-sought technique may eventually let doctors create replacement cells for a wide variety of tissues from bits of a patient’s own skin. One advantage to this approach is that, unlike much of the initial work on stem cells, it doesn’t require the destruction of human embryos. That practice drew fierce opposition from some religious leaders and right-to-life groups, although their criticism has faded as researchers switched to adult stem cells and, more recently, regular cells reprogrammed into stem cells through genetic engineering.

Some critics continue to argue that it’s unethical to manipulate the genetic makeup of human eggs even if they’re unfertilized, and others warn about potential harm to egg donors. The biggest ethical issue for the OHSU team, though, is that it artificially created a human embryo, albeit one that was missing the components needed for implantation and development as a fetus.

So it isn’t an embryo, but it is?

Pay close attention: Dolly came from an “unfertilized egg” and became a sheep. Before that, she was a sheep embryo and a sheep fetus. The act of cloning does not get the egg to create stem cells, it produces an embryo.  After that, the cloning is over and the question becomes what to do with the embryo, NOT WHAT TO DO WITH THE UNFERTILIZED EGG!

As to the question of reproductive cloning: The researchers haven’t tried to bring a human baby to birth. They note that they have also not been able yet to bring a cloned monkey embryo to birth. That doesn’t mean they won’t. It’s all just a matter of technology now. Indeed,  until lately, you couldn’t make human cloned embryos. Now scientists can.

The Times argues in favor of a ban on reproductive cloning, but permitting research cloning to proceed:

Still, the federal government needs to set rules that would stop researchers in this country from crossing the line between generating stem cells and trying to bring a cloned embryo to life. Adding a clear prohibition would help assure the public that stem cell research should be embraced, not feared.

AAUGH! The cloned embryo is already alive! 

Here’s the strategy: Big Biotech is always willing to prohibit that which they cannot yet do. But they want authority to conduct the research they can do, which will eventually lead to being able to do what they can’t, at which point the prohibition is revoked because now “society is ready.”

Bottom line: If you want to prevent the eventual birth of a cloned human baby, the only way to do that is prohibit human SCNT. 

I now see that the old dishonest game is well afoot: Biotech types and media pretending that human cloning isn’t really human cloning unless a baby is born. The cloning breakthrough is instead being spun as skin cells into stem cells!  As if it were induced pluripotent stem cells, which really do turn skin into stem cells.

But back to the mendacity. A story in News.Com.Au–which runs stories from several Australian newspapers celebrates the cloning breakthrough because it means no embryos are used in the process!  From the story, “Embryonic Stem Cell Made From Skin:”

US researchers have reported a breakthrough in stem cell research, describing how they have turned human skin cells into embryonic stem cells for the first time. The method described on Wednesday by Oregon State University scientists in the journal Cell, would not likely be able to create human clones, said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, senior scientist at the Oregon National Primate Research Center. But it is an important step in research because it doesn’t require the use of embryos in creating the type of stem cell capable of transforming into any other type of cell in the body.

Doesn’t require the use of embryos? IT MAKES EMBRYOS TO BE USED! From the paper:

Most embryos…formed one or two pronuclei at the time of removal from TSA, whereas a slightly higher portion of embryos cleaved…suggesting that some SCNT embryos did not exhibit visible pronuclei at the time of examination… Most cleaved embryos developed to the eight-cell stage…but few progressed to compact morula…and blastocyst..stages. Activation of embryonic genes and transcription from the transplanted somatic cell nucleus are required for development of SCNT embryos beyond the eight-cell stage…Therefore, these results are consistent with the premise that our modified SCNT protocol supports reprogramming of human somatic cells to the embryonic state.

Repeat after me: Human SCNT creates a human embryo through asexual means. It doesn’t create stem cells. The cloning is completed when the SCNT is accomplished. After that, there is no more cloning. The only question is what you do with the living human embryo you have manufactured. 

The junk biology is flying in the media’s descriptions of the now accomplished human cloning. This next example comes from the Wall Street Journal’s Gautam Naik. From the ridiculously titled, “Experiment Brings Human Cloning One Step Closer:”

Scientists have used cloning technology to transform human skin cells into embryonic stem cells, an experiment that may revive the controversy over human cloning. The researchers stopped well short of creating a human clone. But they showed, for the first time, that it is possible to create cloned embryonic stem cells that are genetically identical to the person from whom they are derived.

NO. THEY EXPLICITLY CREATED A HUMAN CLONE! That’s what SCNT cloning does; creates a cloned embryo. A cloned embryo–like a natural embryo–is an individual organism, a member of its (in this case, human) species.

Once the SCNT is done, the cloning is over. After that, the question becomes not whether to clone, but what to do with the embryo that was created through the cloning process. These scientists destroyed the embryos and derived stem cell lines. 

In fact, don’t take my word for it. Let’s have the authors of the paper describe it. From the Cell paper:

Most embryos…formed one or two pronuclei at the time of removal from TSA, whereas a slightly higher portion of embryos cleaved…suggesting that some SCNT embryos did not exhibit visible pronuclei at the time of examination… Most cleaved embryos developed to the eight-cell stage…but few progressed to compact morula…and blastocyst..stages. Activation of embryonic genes and transcription from the transplanted somatic cell nucleus are required for development of SCNT embryos beyond the eight-cell stage…Therefore, these results are consistent with the premise that our modified SCNT protocol supports reprogramming of human somatic cells to the embryonic state.

Media: Get it right, or don’t get it at all!

Now that human cloning is upon us, look for many scientists and their camp followers (or ignorant reporters) to mislead about what the technology entails. Human SCNT creates human embryos through asexual means. It does not create stem cells. To obtain cloned stem cells, the embryos have to be nurtured and maintained in a dish for about 10 days, destroyed, and the stem cell lines derived.

But don’t look for the embryo part to make many stories. Early case in point, a story by Loren Grush on FNC:

In a major medical breakthrough, researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) have for the first time ever successfully converted human skin cells into embryonic stem cells–via a technique called nuclear transfer. The research has major implications for the future of medical treatments, as many believe embryonic stem cells are the key to treating damaged cells lost through injury or illness.  According to various medical researchers, stem cell therapy has the potential to treat anything from heart disease and spinal cord injuries to major neurological diseases, like Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis.

Through a common laboratory method known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), ONPRC scientists, along with researchers at Oregon Health & Science University, essentially swapped the genetic codes of an unfertilized egg and a human skin cell to create their new embryonic stem cells…The combination of the egg’s cytoplasm and the skin cell’s nucleus eventually grows and develops into the embryonic stem cell.

False! Repeat after me: The unfertilized egg is not turned into stem cells. Rather, in the same cloning process as resulted in Dolly the sheep, it becomes an embryo, which is destroyed to obtain the cells. Moreover, the process is hardly common. In fact, this is the first time SCNT has worked in humans. That’s why it’ a big story!

The human cloning issue is going go be a Mt. Everest of ethical contention. If we are going to discuss this rationally, we need accurate information from the scientists and the media. I plan to hold both to account in this regard going forward.

The world just changed. An international consortium of scientists have announced that they have successfully cloned human beings using the process that led to Dolly the sheep. They were able to develop four cloned embryos in a dish to the ”blastocyst” stage,  the point in time when an embryo can be implanted in a uterus or destroyed for stem cells. The scientists here did the latter. 

This is huge news–reproduction as replication. The door is now open to the development of Brave New World technologies such as genetic engineering and the birth of cloned babies. As I wrote in my book on these issues, Consumer’s Guide to a Brave New World:

We can pursue biotechnology to treat disease and improve the human condition, while retaining sufficient humility and self-restraint to keep ourselves from endangering the intrinsic value of human life.  Or, we can hubristically rush onto the very anti-human path warned against by Aldous Huxley, driven by our thirst for knowledge, vast profits, and obsession with control and vastly expanded life spans.  

These issues are too important to be “left to the scientists.”  Nor can we afford to allow the marketplace to determine what is right and what is wrong.  The stakes are too high, the potential impact on each and every one of us too profound, to remain passive and indifferent to the decisions that are to be made.  It is our duty to participate in the crucial cultural and democratic debates over biotechnology.  The human future, quite literally, depends on it. 

I will write more extensively about this shortly. In the meantime, hold on to your hats–the culture wars just got more intense and divisive.

How often we are told by “the scientists” that those outside the field have no business telling them what to–and more particularly, what not–to do. And yet, again and again and again, we learn that some scientists refuse to restrain themselves.

A new story in Slate about scientists making human/animal hybrids is a case in point. From, “Manimal Rights,” by Daniel Engber:

But the regulations try to draw the line at full hybrids–where animal eggs are fertilized with human sperm or vice-versa. And they also ban the use of chimeric animals with human brains. These aren’t right-wing talking points so much as common ethical intuitions. It’s OK to mess with a creature’s “simple” parts–the plumbing in its gut, let’s say–but we’re risking moral crisis when we start to humanize its neural tissue. Nonpartisan expert commissions have reached the same conclusion. After two years studying the issue, the British Academy of Medical Sciences released a report in 2011 that found people would be uneasy over interspecies mergers that looked or acted human or had a human-like brain.

Yes, restraint is so “right wing.” But here’s the punch line: Some scientists don’t give a fig:

Yet experiments like these are going forward just the same. In just the past few months, scientists at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Rochester have published data on their human-animal neural chimeras. For the Wisconsin study, researchers injected mice with an immunotoxin to destroy a part of their brains–the hippocampus–that’s associated with learning, memory, and spatial reasoning. Then the researchers replaced those damaged cells with cells derived from human embryos. The cells proliferated and the lab chimeras recovered their ability to navigate a water maze.

For the Rochester study, researchers implanted newborn mice with nascent human glial cells, which help support and nourish neurons in the brain. Six months later, the human parts had elbowed out the mouse equivalents, and the animals had enhanced ability to solve a simple maze ;and learn conditioned cues.  These protocols might run afoul of the anti-hybrid laws, and perhaps they should arouse some questions. These chimeric mice may not be human, or even really human, but they’re certainly one step further down the path to Algernon. It may not be so long before we’re faced with some hairy bioethics: What rights should we assign to mice with human brains?

None. But let’s not get into that now. The real question is when are we going to enforce the regulations with sharp teeth? Do we need to criminalize these experiments to get scientists to stop? Because when we say, “ban ” certain kinds of experiments, we are pejoratively labeled as “anti science,” and that we should trust “the scientists” not to stray too far afield.

Talk is cheap. The truth is, I think many scientists oppose any permanent and meaningful restraints–on themselves and each other. If I am right, society will have to forcefully take matters into its own hands.

Alas. Today, the Vermont Legislature passed a bill that legalizes assisted suicide in the state. The governor has promised to sign it into law and it will take effect immediately. In three years, the protective guidelines will sunset and VT will have essentially no rules assisted suicide. 

This is very bad news disguised as compassion. Nor, in the long run, will the death agenda be limited to the terminally ill. Eventually, Vermont will end up off the same vertical moral cliff as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

There is growing advocacy among the intelligentsia that denies free will–one of the morally relevant traits in our natures that make us exceptional–claiming instead that our behavior is predetermined by evolutionary forces acting on human behavior down the ages, and more particularly, on our individual genetic makeup. If we can’t help ourselves, concepts of “right” and “wrong” will have to be replaced by forced non judgmentalism toward all personal behaviors and the medicalization of society’s responses to what are now considered criminal behaviors.

Along this line, the Guardian has published a long article about research by Adrian Raine, by which he seeks too demonstrate that violent behaviors may be products of the perpetrators’ brain structures. Raine has taken brain scans of violent criminals and believes that he has found organic commonalities, leading him to propose that the time has come to stop punishing violent behavior as a crime, but instead, to treat murderers as if they are medical patients. From, “How to Spot a Murderer’s Brain:”

Raine’s account of the most recent research into these reactions, it still seems to me quite new and surprising that environmental factors change the physical structure of the brain. We tend to talk about a child’s development in terms of more esoteric ideas of mind rather than material brain structures, but the more you look at the data the clearer the evidence that abuse or neglect or poor nutrition or prenatal smoking and drinking have a real effect on whether or not those healthy neural connections–which lead to behaviour associated with maturity, self-control and empathy–are made. The science of this is called epigenetics, the way our environment regulates the expression of our innate genetic code.

There is no doubt that epigenetics is real. But is gene expression really a puppet master?

One result of epigenetics might be, Raine suggests, that “social scientists can actually win from this. I mean, if a child experiences a murder in his or her neighbourhood, we have found that their test scores on a range of measures go down. There is something happening in the brain as a result of that experience of violence to affect cognition. So social scientists can have their cake and eat it. They can say look, we can prove that these environmental social factors are causing brain impairment, which leads to some real, measurable problems.”

Of course emotional upset can impact performance. But that doesn’t mean brain structures are altered to the point that people cease to be personally responsible. For example, abused children are more likely to be abusers. But not all abused children abuse and not all abusers were abused children.  

But Raine apparently believes the criminal doesn’t make free will choices, and hence, we should medicalize society’s response to what are now deemed “criminal” actions:

But if neural scanning becomes more routine, and neuroscience more precise, will there not come a point where most violent behaviour–that of the Boston bombers, say, or the Newtown killer–is argued away in court as an illness, rather than a crime?

Raine believes that there might well be. He even likens such a shift to our change in perception of cancer, until fairly recently often deemed the “fault” of the sufferer because of some repressive character trait. “If we buy into the argument that for some people factors beyond their control, factors in their biology, greatly raise the risk of them becoming offenders, can we justly turn a blind eye to that?” Raine asks. “Is it really the fault of the innocent baby whose mother smoked heavily in pregnancy that he went on to commit crimes? Or if he was battered from pillar to post, or even if he was born with a, abnormally low resting heart rate, how harshly should we punish him? How much should we say he is responsible? There is, and increasingly will be, an argument that he is not fully responsible and therefore, when we come to think of punishment, should we be thinking of more benign institutions than prison?”

As I said, this is an attack on free will and moral responsibility.

But I want to focus on the idea that ”social scientists can actually win” from destroying personal responsibility. That reinforces an idea I have been pondering lately. So let’s take a look at this from a different–and I must say, provocative angle: It seems to me that the political and cultural left tend to be most receptive to theories and research of this kind. Why? The contemporary left (generally) rejects the traditional concept of liberty because it assumes a generally accepted moral order to which most adhere willingly, requires personal responsibility, and expects self-restraint as a concomitant duty to enjoying the fruits of freedom.

But the left sees that as oppressive and wants to “liberate” us all from those burdens so that we may fully explore and actualize our own personal identities–and that requires allowing behavioral license, doing away with moral judgments and fixed concepts of right and wrong, and payment by society for the costs and consequences associated with living as truly ourselves.

Of course, such radical self-actualization can lead to moral chaos. Ah, but that’s where the technocracy comes in.  The left wants society to be ruled by scientific ”experts,” managed by bureaucrats, with dysfunctional (to be judgmental) ”clients”( if you will) served and protected by hosts of social and government workers doling out welfare state benefits and services. Stripping personal responsibility from what is now considered “criminal” behavior is consistent with that meme. We shouldn’t punish criminals, but instead protect us from them by empathetically treating and serving them as victims of their own anatomy.