Slashdot Mirror
Korean Lab Worker Forced to Donate Her Own Eggs
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Woo Suk Hwang had attained international fame by successfully cloning a human embryo, but he accomplished his feat by pressuring a lab worker into donating her own eggs. Consequently, Gerald Schatten, a cell biologist at the University of Pittsburgh, has severed his ties with Mr. Hwang and cited gross breaches of ethics."
I think you grossly misunderstand Communism. Communism is not the same thing as fascism, authoritarianism, or anything along those lines. In fact, it's not a governmental so much as an economic system. I'm not advocating it, all evidence shows that Communism does not work. Nevertheless, it is not "evil." If you take the word "communist" out of the above post, it'll work fine.
Le français vous intéresse?
Questionable ethics from somebody working towards human cloning?
Why doesn't this surprise me?
I don't know. Prejudice maybe?
What if she is a prostitute?
Got Shadowrun? Awakened Worlds
You are surmising a fiction not in evidence. This article posting is exactly why you cannot consider Slashdot a source of "news."
Reputable journalists preface opinion pieces as such. Infering facts that do not exist is not journalism.
I'm just looking for a source for the reports of this allegation.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
In more advanced countries, we name the laws after the wrong committed.
ie: It's "sex with a minor", not "Statutory Rape" since whether or not it was rape is not the problem being dealt with (it's a separate problem). The problem being dealt with is that, in fact, sex with a minor occurred. If the minor were raped, then a secondary charge of "raping a minor" would be enforced.
In some countries (notably my own) it is not considered rape should a 16 year old have sex with a willing 15 year + 11 month old.
Similarly, we call "improper practices" exactly that, "improper practices". We don't call it "forcing" or "coercion" because we don't know if that's true or not. There's every chance that a doctor so engaged in her duty might actually be willing to donate her eggs to further her research -- it doesn't seem unlikely that it could be so.
The title should be "Korean Lab Worker uses Improper Practices to Further Research".
I just wish people would use say what they mean and mean what they say, dammit. Thank God the laws in most countries are much more clear.
They have exhausted their other options when it comes to delaying embryonig stem-cell research.
Since several states have started passing budgets with money dedicated to embryonic stem cell research, its oponents have been growing increasingly rabid and vicious in the last few months. The 3B dollars approved under proposition 71 in California have been delayed so far for more than a year. Expect those well-meaning folk trying to save your soul at the expense of your body to jump on this news and integrate it in their propaganda machine ASAP.
If you are subscribed to the google news feed on the topic ("stem cell" or "stem cells" are good candidate strings (does that thing take regexp btw?)) you will see that almost every week a major new scientific announcement is made. There are signs of improvement for a lot of diseases previously thought incurable. Not all of this stuff gets mentioned in the mainstream media in the US.
Don't go silently into that peaceful night
The tag is misleading at best, if not an outright troll. There is no indication that the donor was pressured or coerced in any way. In fact there is no indication of any wrongdoing except for an allegation by the American scientist, with no offering of proof. Do we know what HIS motives were?
Whoever greenlit this should have caught it-- for God's sake the article itself is a blurb, it would take 30 seconds to read. If you're against human cloning there's plenty of fodder for your argument, you should not be allowed to use Slashdot as your pulpit to demonize the other side.
What everyone seems to be missing is that, if there's a power gradient, there's implicit coercion involved.
That's why prostitution isn't a legitimate job.
No, the reason prostitution isn't a legitimate job (in the USA anyway) is because America has a very puritan view when it comes to sex (and see's the depiction of violence to be much more acceptable then the depcition of consensual sex) and the American government loves to invade people's bedrooms.
Don't think for one minute prostitution being illegal is because of protecting women's rights. If it was truly about that, then the government would set up standards of health, working hours, working conditions, pay, etc that people must follow if they are in the prostitution industry.
statutory rape laws protect women who are too young to have the capacity to consent, whereas a researcher in a genetic lab would have all the information she would need to consent to an egg donation
Obviously women are weak-minded and are unable to grasp the situation in order to protect their rights and themselves.[/sarcasm]
Before sperm donations could be paid for, the men working at the clinics would often donate their own sperm in order for there to be enough supply of sperm, because demand was so great and there simply wasn't enough unafilliated men donating to meet the demand there was for sperm. No blanket laws or guidelines had to be made to stop these men from donating their sperm. They knew exactly what they were doing. The same thing should be applied to women.
The idea of men or women being coerced into donating sperm or ovaries in order to keep their jobs is despicable. But If you're going to make a blanket policy to protect one sex, then you should protect the other as well. Otherwise you say the "protected" sex is too weak to protect themselves and make decisions, while the "unprotected" gender isn't important enough to be protected.
but then, why is it not unethical for me to work 80 hour weeks for a few months to keep my job by keeping my project up and running? That woman damn well ought to have been under pressure if they can't get donors. The research is important and she, working on the project, was in the best position to know what was needed to keep it going.
We aren't talking about a woman being asked to give up a baby. We aren't even talking about an embryo. We are hypothetically talking about a lady giving up an egg towards research she probably cares at least a little about.
In the US, lots of things get called unethical and I don't know why. Even in science, you want the person in your lab group who will take a hit for the team if it won't leave any permanent marks. So the lady couldn't get pregnant that one time around. It is only unethical if you think it is wrong for someone to give up something with almost no value to help a project along. She lost about 28 days of her reproductive life.
Now if she had been told upon being hired to not get pregnant because they might need her as a donor, that gets into my unethical side. I don't believe there are many fields of work where involving yourself in someone's personal life to that extent is acceptable.
Though, I"m not attacking you. I'm really attacking a system that says a scientist can't give one more thing towards the success of the project.
For all the slashdot crowd here comparing egg donation to sperm donation or, heaven forbid, having to work long hours, a basic interjection of reality (though IANAMD)
1) Egg donation is a surgical procedure. A painful surgical procedure. A single egg is not magically transported from the woman's body - essentially a surgical procedure akin to a biopsy is peformed. Yes, modern surgical methods are better, but the pain is real, the risk of surgery is real, which leads to:
2) Egg donation potentially impacts fertility. This is a delicate procedure, and things can go wrong.
Donating one's eggs to scientific research is a noble action, and I deeply respect the person who does so. But it's a serious matter, and the merest appearnace that outside pressure was applied to influence a worker to donate her eggs calls into question the ethics of the project team itself.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
Actually communism worked pretty well... in small hunter gatherer tribes where every member of the community realised that his/her existence depended on the welfare of the other members. Therefore sharing resources, in that context, is the most obvious way to do things. In larger societies, it's more difficult to relate the welfare of Joe I Don't Dnow and Don't Wanna Know Who, to one's own best interest is much more difficult. And swindling is easy in any big structure, whatever type of government or private interest it resprents. Similarly capitalism works when the population is small enough that the accumulation of resources by a few does not significantly deplete the globally available resources. But since resources are finite, when the increase of welfare of a few signifies a significant drop of survival odds of a significant fraction of the population... things change and usually in bloodshed, since the established elite is not likely to be willing to forfeit its priviledges for the benefit of mere "commoners". Capitalism is the economic system of choice when rsources (and thereofore opportunity) seem plentiful, while communism is the system ofchoice of desperate people who think of survival, when resources appear very limited. The failure of the first is the the system itself whic acts as a positive feedback pump which causes resources to become ever scarcer for the greater number. The failure of the second is that as soon as survival seems assured, people start wishing to improve their personal lot with respect to their fellow humans. Their respective success is their downfall in the end.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
I know the parent was being funny, but on the contrary, eggs cost between US$10,000 to US$50,000. I'm curious to why they didn't just purchase the egg themselves instead of having one of the lab assistants to donate. The only viable reasonings that I can come up with is:
1. They didn't have enough money, which I highly doubt because with a project of this size, money's gotta be pouring in from somewhere. Though money conservation may be another reasoning, but once again, I don't believe money should've been an issue with this project.
2. The lab assistant insisted they use her eggs and was happy to donate them. There can be multiple reasons for that. She may have been an unknown lab assistance and if the project was sucessful, her name might have come up once in the findings document, but the top researchers would be the one getting a the credit. Now with her name gauranteed in the article, her fame can be used for multiple things such as taking her into higher levels of research or even lead governmental sponsered researches. I'm not sure what this lab worker exactly was, but if she was an undergrad, she's probably going to be garaunteed admission into any graduate program and if she was a graduate student, have her Ph.D papers signed off. Many of you can see this as 'betraying yourself' to get somewhere and I guess that's what the ethical reasons against this is for.
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