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 don't see anything in TFA about coercion ... where did that part come from?
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Man. What a fucking cheapskate. Eggs are like, what, $1.29 a dozen?
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
A quick glance at the article shows it happened at Seoul University which is in South Korea. Last I heard, South Korea hadn't been overrun by the communists from the north.
Got Shadowrun? Awakened Worlds
Questionable ethics from somebody working towards human cloning?
Why doesn't this surprise me?
I don't know. Prejudice maybe?
I would say something about having egg on his face, but I don't really think it's appropriate.
Now the poor chaps who are trying to achieve something worthwhile with their medical science using stem cells or whatnot have to deal with another round of "oh god, what is the world coming to?" And "quick! Lets ban the whole lot before someone else does something this stupid."
Typical misrepresentation of the facts by the submitter.
No where in the linked article was there any impliation that Dr. Hwang used any form of pressure, coersion, or other unscrupulous means to obtain the eggs.
The reasons given by Mr. Schatten is pretty clearly stated:
Under U.S. rules, collecting eggs from women working on a cloning project would be considered unethical. In the original paper, published by the journal Science last year, the scientists said the eggs all came from anonymous donors.
Hwang lied about where the eggs came from, and used (from the standpoint of the US) and inappropriate donor.
I know this is just user submitted stuff here, but could we at leat pretend like accurately representing the article is important. Or do we just assume no one will bother to read a 1/2 summary without some creative spin in the summary.
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.
Pulled from Science, Vol 304, Issue 5673, 945 , 14 May 2004:
Last week Nature reported that in an interview a member of the research team admitted being one of the egg donors, raising questions about whether she profited professionally by being a co-author. Nature quoted bioethicists as saying that, to avoid any hint of coercion, there should be an arms-length relationship between the research group and the donors.
Hwang blames the language barrier for "a miscommunication." He says the woman had tried to explain that, in the future, she would be willing to donate eggs for such research by other groups. Moon-il Park, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Hanyang University in Seoul and chair of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at the university hospital that approved the research plan--the eggs were harvested at the hospital--wrote in an e-mail that no one from Hwang's team was among the 16 volunteers. "I confirmed this after being contacted by Professor Hwang" regarding the allegations, he wrote.
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.
Seeing as how his name is Woo Suk Hwang, we can at least be assured that he has an abundant supply of semen to work with.
Such situations between superiors and subordinates are inherently coercive. Even if the superior adamantly claims that he won't take the refusal into account when considering promotions, raises, recommendations, etc. there's absolutely no way to assure that. Moreover, even if the superior genuinely won't hold it against the subordinate, the subordinate could still feel as though he's being coerced.
This is why, in these situations, it is assumed that coercion would occur, and the situation is therefore forbidden without exception.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz