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."

Comments

Schatten sure took his time severing those ties

[SuperBanana]

Consequently, Gerald Schatten, a cell biologist at the University of Pittsburgh, has severed his ties with Mr. Hwang and cited gross breaches of ethics.

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.

Re:People may not agree on where the line is.

[CosmeticLobotamy]

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.

Re:Forced?

[Melkman]

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.

Medical Ethics?

[putko]

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?"