New basic human right discovered
According to an article in New Scientist, an Italian fertility expert, Severino Antinori, claims that a woman in the cloning program that he's running is eight weeks pregnant. (Antinori did not repeat the claim to New Scientist, so really the article is reporting an unsubstantiated rumor that Antinori made such a claim.) This is an interesting development, but doesn't particularly surprise me; I assume it's only a matter of time before we have human cloning. (A Wired article I read a few months back suggested that it may already have happened, but I try to take Wired articles with large hunks of salt.)
(And I have no idea how well-respected New Scientist is.)
So to me the most interesting thing about this article is not the idea that a human cloning is in progress, if indeed that turns out to be true, but the reactions to the news. Several researchers note that this is irresponsible for a very practical reason that I hadn't heard before: Rudolf Jaenisch of MIT, for example, says that "All evidence [from the cloning that's been done so far, of seven mammalian species] indicates that most clones die early . . . and the rare survivors may have serious abnormalities which may become apparent only later." I hadn't heard that before, and it's the best argument I've yet seen for not doing human reproductive cloning until we're better at cloning in general.
But here's the bit that really startled me:
Donald Bruce, of the Church of Scotland . . . says human reproductive cloning is ethically unacceptable in any circumstances as people have a right not to have another's DNA forced upon them.
I'm still not sure I follow what he's saying. Whose DNA is being forced on whom? I'm thinking he's saying that the child-to-be has the right not to have been created using the DNA of the donor; if that's true, this is the twistiest bit of logic I've encountered all day.
And even if you accept that logic, is it really true that people have that right? Is it one of those fundamental inalienable rights that citizens of some nations are guaranteed by their constitutions or laws? Is it a God-given right, described in some church's scripture somewhere? Or did Donald Bruce just make up this new right and assign it to a class of people who don't exist yet?
Color me baffled.