As the ordeal in South Korea continues over the break up of the U.S./South Korean egg trafficking agreement, Rick Weiss has a good piece out in the Washington Post. Seems noone is still willing to address this issue of egg donation, proper informed consent, and financial compensation of women donors before running down the path of embryo cloning research. These concerns are at the heart of this latest fiasco. Were female students in Woo Suk Hwang's lab, compensated for their eggs? Were female students who were involved in the research using their own eggs? Was proper informed consent given? Can proper informed consent even be given when we are talking about unethical research and the use of human subjects? Can donors be compensated? Oops! How many breaches of ethical conduct can you count?
Weiss states, "With current techniques, it takes dozens of eggs to make a single cloned human embryo, which is destroyed in the process of extracting the stem cells. That means that if the field of therapeutic cloning is to advance -- a field involving the creation of cloned embryos as sources of stem cells that would be genetically matched to particular patients -- a significant number of eggs will be needed both to fuel the initial research and eventually to satisfy the demands of patients."
Did I hear him say clone? And notice that a significant number of eggs will be needed to satisfy the demand. Some have done that math and researchers will need hundreds of thousands of eggs for this designer patient research. While it is nice to know that we are needed, this is not good news for us.
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