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Tuesday November 15, 2005
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US Researcher Leaves Korean Cloning Team over Ethics of Ova Donation
By Hilary White
PITTSBURGH, November 15, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A major US researcher, Gerald Schatten, has severed his ties with Korean maverick cloning doctor, Hwang Woo-suk citing ethical objections. Dr. Schatten, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences with the University of Pittsburgh, said that he believes ethical rules concerning ova donation were broken and that he had been misled by Hwang. Dr. Schatten’s major allegation was that a member of the research team had donated the ova for the work, which violates ethical protocols for research.
Ova donation, which involves drugs that boost production of ovaries has real risks for women and many in the pro-life community have warned that the huge numbers required for research would create a market that would end by exploiting poor and vulnerable women.
Dr. Schatten told the Washington Post that he no longer trusts Hwang. “I now have information that leads me to believe he had misled me,” he said. “My trust has been shaken. I am sick at heart. I am not going to be able to collaborate with Woo-Suk.”
Another collaborator of Hwang’s, Sung Il Roh of the MizMedi Hospital in Seoul is under police investigation on suspicion of having illegally obtained ova for Hwang’s research.
In March this year, one of the grande dames of the pro-abortion feminist movement in the US, Judy Norsigian, warned that systematic exploitation of women is the natural result of cloning advancement. She said, “There is a disturbing lack of attention to the risks to women's health posed by the advent of embryo cloning.”
Reports of ethical problems from the Hwang research team will come as no surprise to long-time LifeSiteNews.com readers who read earlier this year of the tenuousness of Hwang’s grasp of the realities of his research. He said at a press conference in June that, though he was creating human clones at the embryonic stage, he was not doing “human cloning.”
Hwang tried to equate “human cloning” with what is usually referred to as “reproductive cloning,” that is, allowing a clones to be brought to term instead of being killed for research. Hwang said in an interview that cloning experiments were “dangerous, complicated and unethical,” and that he would never consider making human clones.
“Cloning a human being is nonsense. Briefly, it is not ethical, it is not safe at all, and it’s technically impossible,” Hwang said. “Cloned human beings are merely a science fiction fantasy. I can assure you that on this globe, you'll never bump into a cloned human being at least within [sic] 100 years.”
Hwang, however, catapulted to international fame by being the first scientist in the world to create cloned human embryos and later, to create clones of patients in order to obtain stem cells specifically intended for disease therapies.
Read Previous LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Cloners in State of Complete Moral Disconnect
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/jun/05060809.html
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