THOSE KOOKY CHINESE!

Cloning isn’t something I have given too much thought to. My first reaction to human cloning is, “YUCK!” My second reaction is “DOUBLE YUCK!” The thought freaks me out. On the religious side of it I wonder about the whole soul issue. How many souls do we have here? Are they different or the same? I defer to the Church on that, even though I don’t know what their position is. I know, sounds very un-Mike like to automatically accept someone else’s position without know what it is, but in the matters of theology, I don’t worry too much about it. (Reminds me of Sivio Berlusconi of Italy who said something like, “I agree with the United State’s position on foreign affairs, whatever it is” – ya gotta love that man) On the medical side, I can see huge problems and abuses. Who couldn’t imagine rich, old charlatans like Ted Turner cloning themselves to have spare body parts on hand, just in case.

Anyway, the whole issue just got ickier. The Chinese created human-rabbit embryos. Yeah, human-rabbit embryos.

“More than 100 of the hybrids, made by fusing human skin cells with rabbit eggs, were allowed to develop in laboratory dishes for several days before the scientists destroyed them to retrieve so-called embryonic stem cells from their interiors.”

Those Chinese are just plain sick. Reading the article in horror that just rehashes the stem cell stuff we’ve all heard about. But at the end we get this gem:

“R. Alta Charo, an associate dean of law and professor of bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, noted that the work passed muster with Chinese ethics authorities, who had demanded, among other things, that the embryos not be allowed to grow more than 14 days.”

“Passed muster with Chinese ethics authorities”?!? This, coming from the country that brought us the “Cultural Revolution” (20 million dead). That ethics bar must be set pretty low – so low, they think it’s OK to create a human-rabbit embryo.

File this under People Not Like Us