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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."
Coercion came in the same way that it would come in when a high-powered executive tells his female secretary that, for the good of the firm, she should put on some nice red lipstick and give him a messy blowjob. A woman's job should not involve her sexual organs, apparatus, or cells in any way, damn it!
What the submitter left out was this nice bit:
Dr. Schatten, who was to have led the organization's board of directors, says he is now severing collaboration with Dr. Hwang, due to questions over the source of human eggs used in a 2004 cloning project, and errors in a 2005 paper coauthored by the scientists. A 2004 news report in the journal Nature said at least one female laboratory worker had provided eggs for the project, an allegation that Dr. Hwang has denied on several occasions.
Is it just me, or does it look like Schatten didn't have a problem with the forced collection, only starting to sever ties (note the tense there: "is now severing", ie, he hasn't finished?) after problems come up with a paper?
I can't see why else he waited a year after it was public knowledge (and no doubt knowledge to him well before the news report) to sever his ties.
Please help metamoderate.
a columnist during the past election cycle quoted her child as having said to her 'John Kerry wants to make medicine out of babies.'
I remember that. And right after that, my 1-year-old son put down his Tonka truck and asked, "Daddy, why do columnists make up bad propaganda lines and then pretend their kid said it to make up for the fact that if an adult said it, he'd look really, really dumb?" Then he burped up on himself.
All that means is that this is a violation of policy, not that it is a violation of ethics. People like to toss the term "ethics" around, but you can't properly use it to describe something that does not have moral significance. Requesting and/or accepting eggs from a subordinate may in fact have no moral significance. Same for a blow job. It all depends on the circumstances and subtleties of the situation. For example, the subordinate might be my wife, and we may be in bed at home. Or she might be someone that is even more passionate about the reasearch than I am, and has been volunteering to donate her eggs for months. Policy != Morality. Following policies doesn't make you moral and breaking them doesn't make you immoral. Actions are moral or immoral in themselves.
It is here. There was even a specialized union for it "De rode draad" (the red thread). Alas this has been terminated and they can now only join one of the big multidisciplinairy unions. Gotta love the Netherlands.
I've often thought that the medical ethics community was a bunch of smart, Talmudic guys somehow looking for relevancy and importance through their arguing skills. E.g. if a man dies in a car wreck and there's no next of kin, is it OK to harvest his organs? OK, fine -- you are in the middle of harvesting the guys liver, and the intended donor is there cut open -- just when you are about to transfer the liver, the next of kin appear, declare that if you take the liver out of their family member, he won't have one in the afterlife. But if you don't do the transfer the intended recipient will probably die earlier due to having been cut open -- blah blah blah blah.
Is it OK to harvest fetal material from abortions. When is it OK to pull the plug on a brain-dead person? When is it OK to euthanize somebody?
This is comical: in early medicine, you had doctors robbing bodies out of graves so they could figure out how the bodies worked. Sometimes they'd get lynched for this, so doctors established a network, so that doctors from town-a would tell doctors from town-b, "we got a body in cemetary-a". Town-b doctors would rob it, and when they had a body in cemetary-b, they'd tell the doctors from town-a. That's the origin of modern medicine.
I wonder what the medical ethicists would have said.
I think we'd all be better off if we didn't have medical ethicists, and instead just asked ourselves, "what is legal?"
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Looks a little "extreme", but I googled this "interesting" link about the differences in government health policies for men & women.
I agree that a totally captitalist system will in 99.99% of cases create the strongest economy, which would be fine if the economy was the be-all and end-all of creating a society that works.
Equally important to a society's success are law & order, social equality, healthcare and education. In a totally capitalist state, everyone pays their own way whether they can afford to or not. This creates a situation where the rich get richer, healthier and more powerful (see lobbyists for details. The Pharma. industry couldnt get their way in govornment if they hadn't so much money, nor could the food industry). The poor of society loose out, become disaffected, angry and ultimately someone pays the price. The French govornment are finding that out the hard way, and the collectve tragedy of New Orleans stripped bare the inequality of American society. The poor people of N.O had less say in what happens in the court than one lobbying group in Washington
No country is immune. I'm Irish, and proud of it. We have one of the strongest economies in the world, it's easily outperforming the USA at the moment (in terms of percentages, not overall size) but I see ways in which money is starting to sway govornment decisions here, such as the decision to allow a butt-ugly & potentially unsafe Natural Gas pipeline and processing plant to be built in one of the most picturesque parts of our west coast. The company responsible is Shell, and they're f**king the Irish people over for govornment backhanders (probably). The gap between the rich and the poor is growing here, and i'ts a sad thing to see.
The best way to maintain relative equality is to provide a (hopefully positive) feedback loop between the higher echelons of economic success and the poorest in society, through good, affordable healthcare, free(ish) education and laws & tax systems that let people who work hard earn good money (and therefore strengthen the economy). It's a big chunk of capitalism mixed with a small dose of socialism.
All of these things, if implemented by smart, forward thinking politicians who are chosen in free & fair elections, will in themselves bolster the economy and look after the interests of the people of that country, which is basically what Govornments are there for. No country is perfect.
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