The publication This is London screamed this hysterical headline today;
Doctor has cloned cells from dead baby
Gasp! Shock! (naive readers will ask “did he kill the baby?” “did he steal it’s corpse?”)
Then the first line read;
Controversial fertility specialist Panos Zavos today revealed plans to clone a dead baby.
What?!?!? he’s trying to clone a cute little baby
but then we learn;
One involved a child of a one-and-a-half who had died during surgery. For an undisclosed fee from the parents, Dr Zavos and his Kentucky team inserted genetic material from the child’s skin cells into a cow egg, where they continued to grow. The resulting embryos were then terminated.
Uh? What? he’s got the parents consent and he’s terminating the embryos? But you said he wanted to clone a cute widdle baby.
Then we get to this line at the end;
“This was not about created a pregnancy, we are using cow eggs to refine our techniques. This is pure experimentation.”
Ah crap, you just contradicted your opening line.
The hysterical attitude that inspired the reporting slant in this article reminds me of the attitude that early anatomy students had to endure as they studied their discipline, forcing them to running around in the middle of the night stealing corpses.
Finally, do you think China would have problems with a researcher “refining his technique” by using donated cells of dead persons?
Posted by scottm at 03:57 PM