Tuesday, August 6, 2019

IN the NEWS - Research Tourism for Inventors Playing God

...inventors of evil things... Romans 1:30

"In a stunning example of evading ethical controversy by exporting it, Spanish and American researchers have created monkey-human chimeras in China.
The hybrid embryos will be destroyed after they develop a central nervous system and will not be brought to term.
The experiment is ethically risky.
-What if the human stem cells develop in the monkey brain and become conscious?
-What if they become sperm or egg cells?

Although the researchers, from The Salk Institute, in California, and Murcia Catholic University (UCAM), brush off these fears,
they are legitimate and widely-shared.
We are doing the experiments with monkeys in China because, in principle, they cannot be done here,” Estrella Núñez, of UCAM, told El Pais. “What we want is to make progress for the sake of people who have a disease.” She says that if “if human cells migrate to the brain, they will self-destruct.”

Letitia Meynell, of Dalhousie University, told Gizmodo that it was “really depressing to see the willingness of scientists to engage in research tourism when the ethical standards of their home country make it impossible to conduct that research there. Certainly, these are ethically controversial issues. However, scientists who are willing to flout the ethics of their home countries and institutions should see themselves as obligated to make the ethical case for what they are doing.”
BioEdge