It seems lately that blogging has been difficult not because I have had little to post about - but because I could post on so much that it is tough choosing. I have been spending much time preparing for a presentation I gave this past Tuesday, and in doing so I was able to catch up on much of the latest news regarding ESCR. As part of my presentation, I criticized the way scientists seems to be attempting to use increasingly deceptive language when describing what has previously been known as human cloning. Human cloning to therapeutic cloning to somatic cell nuclear transfer to the now preferred nuclear transfer. I await what new term awaits us when nuclear transfer fails to sway enough of the public.
Now Sean Morrison at the University of Michigan has a new name for cloned human embryos . In this speech (at about 1:18 to 1:20) he gave for Michigan Citizens for Stem Cell Research and Cures [sic] (the source of much of my blogging fodder), he twice uses the term "nuclear transfer products" to describe a cloned human embryo.
I suppose that would make most of the rest of us "copulation products", but I'd rather not go there.
So true, Serge. That's what I found so deceptive about Missouri's Amendment Two last year. As Jill Stanek wrote...
ReplyDelete"Crafters of the amendment knew people overwhelmingly oppose cloning. So to authorize cloning while maintaining they were not, they simply changed the definition of cloning to say a clone isn't a clone unless implanted in a mother's uterus.
This is like saying you are not you unless you are in your house. If you leave your house, you are no longer you. You are a thing. And if you are caught outside your house, you can be dissected and sold for parts.
Crafters said while they banned cloning, they endorsed "somatic cell nuclear transfer." This is like banning the killing of humans but endorsing the killing of Homo sapiens. Somatic cell nuclear transfer is cloning."
Imagine how much could be accomplished if both sides of this issue would stop using deceptive rhetoric and just stick with facts and sound reasoning.
I know that this is a serious subject; however I am still "LOL" that I am a "copulation product." Isn't language a beautiful thing?
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