Posted on 10/23/2008 10:09:59 AM PDT by BGHater
How would you feel if your DNA were used without your permission to produce cloned human embryos for medical research? Regardless of whether it is right or wrong to experiment on human embryos, creating them would require either giving women high doses of drugs with unknown side effects to produce the large numbers of eggs needed for cloning research, or the placing of your genes inside cows' or pigs' eggs to produce human-animal hybrid embryos.
So you might well expect to be asked to give your explicit permission before such a morally fraught procedure is carried out using your tissue, but the government doesn't see the need for this. At virtually the last minute, ministers added amendments to the human fertilisation and embryology bill which will receive its final vote in the Commons today, that will allow researchers to use the DNA of tissue donated anonymously in the past to create cloned human embryos. Other amendments would permit the genes of children or of mentally incapacitated adults to be used in similar ways.
Cloning people without their permission violates the principle of informed consent, the right we have to control what is done to or with our bodies. In the case of organ donation, even though your heart or kidneys could be of immediate and genuine benefit to another person – unlike cloning research, where the benefits, if any, are far in the future – you still have the right to refuse. Most of us remember the Alder Hey scandal, in which many parents were profoundly grieved by the discovery that parts of their dead children's bodies had been removed without their permission.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Stalin?
Hitler?
In the USA, I don’t think Henrietta Lacks was ever paid for her contribution to the HeLa immortal cell line, which is still used in research today.
If they can clone you, they can leave “DNA” at a crime scene to implicate you.
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