Humans for sale

From The Weekly Standard (via The Washington Times):


Crossing a line


"If there were ever any doubts that the National Academy of Sciences is pursuing an 'anything' goes approach to biotechnological research, they were erased by the organization's recently published tome, 'Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research.' " Wesley J. Smith writes at the Weekly Standard Web site (www.weeklystandard.com).
"The purported purpose of 'Guidelines' is to create voluntary ethical protocols to govern human embryonic stem cell and therapeutic cloning research -- 'to assure the public that such research is being conducted in an ethical manner.' Setting aside for the moment whether human cloning and embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) can ever be ethical -- a matter that remains heatedly controversial -- the NAS Guidelines clearly don't deliver the goods." said Mr. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture.
"Remember when, in 2001, proponents of federally funded embryonic stem cell research repeatedly told us that all they wanted was access to embryos left over from in vitro fertilization treatments (IVF) that were due to be destroyed anyway? Remember when ESCR advocates repeatedly asserted that they would never countenance the making of human embryos solely for use in research? These warm assurances were intended to convince a wary public that scientists deeply respected human life in all its stages and to soothingly assure us that biotechnologists would limit their investigations to embryos that were already doomed.
"Many of us suspected that restricting scientists to leftover IVF embryos was a temporary measure, a cynical political tactic intended to push the proverbial camel's nose of unlimited human biotechnological research under the flap of the public opinion tent. And that is exactly the way things have turned out.
"With most polls now friendly to ESCR, 'Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research' completely drops the leftover-IVF-embryos-only pretense. Indeed, in a major expansion of policy that was either ignored or dramatically downplayed in media reports and editorials about the guidelines, the NAS explicitly opens the door to using embryos 'made specifically for research' both through fertilization and nuclear transfer cloning.
"This is big news: The most respected science organization in the country is now formally on record as supporting the creation of new human lives explicitly as harvestable and, perhaps, patentable commodities."


People are not things. It's almost time to crack open those Soylent Green cookbooks.