Getting the Wrinkles Out

At one of my places of employment I do many interesting things, lucky girl that I am. One of them sometimes involves sharing interesting news stories with the public. Wednesday, one of the stories was about the cloning of human/cow embryos. "That was a tricky one.", she said, not overstating the case...

When you dig a little deeper, the stories often unfold like the wrinkles in a shirt being ironed. What, at first, appears to be a mess soon starts making sense. The cloning story is a perfect case in point. On the surface, it's an ethical minefield full of the nastiest explosives you could wish for. What to do with a hybrid (chimera) embryo? Allow it to develop to term? Would it survive? What about the genetic diseases carried by one cell to the other? How would the eggs be acquired? What about the notion of "playing God" -- messing with the perceived natural order of things? Not to mention: what would they call it? Cow-boy? Too confusing. Boy-cow? Sexist. Moo-man? Too 50's sci-fi...and STILL sexist.

Enough to make most sensible, rational-yet-non-confrontational people run screaming in the opposite direction. But wait. The powers that be are trying to do something (cue the superhero music). The UK (from whence the story originated), like most other countries that need such a thing, has a standing Authority that regulates all legitimate research in that field, and each application for permission is considered on a case-by-case basis. There are also many rules in place to handle a lot of those sticky questions, including the one about the life of a hybrid embryo: answer: max. 14 days (most don't even survive half that long...).

The difficulty is that these regulations are constantly playing catch up with gallumphing advances in the field. Just when someone claimed chimeras to be so much pie-in-the-sky, along come the Chinese, way back in 2003, cloning embryos using rabbit eggs and human DNA. It's no wonder churches and other watchdog groups make a considerable (and understandable) noise, questioning or outright opposing such research. Add to that the "your worst nightmare" scenarios, which make people verrrry jittery, and unfortunately rational, informed debate falls by the wayside. Those who wade into the debate shoulder-deep should be the ones to do the kind of background work I have to do. It doesn't take long (yaaayyy Internet!!!!) Too bad they can't all work my job for a day... maybe that's a good thing.