c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) I apologize if you are eating breakfast, but scientists have been mixing hamster eggs with human sperm in petri dishes for years. The so-called “hamster test” is used in fertility clinics; it measures the ability of the human sperm to penetrate a hamster egg. Fertilization proper does not occur.

Human sperm and human eggs mixed in those little petri dishes are the start of in vitro fertilization, and the results are implanted in the prospective mother’s body. The “extra” embryos created in the process are either destroyed, frozen, or donated to researchers who want embryonic stem cells.

Most people rightly recoil at the thought of creating embryo farms for harvesting stem cells, and several U.S. states have outlawed them. But sperm and egg are old-fashioned “reproductive technology.” Nowadays cloning is the in thing.

And cloning, in theory at least, is not that complicated.

Think of your breakfast eggs. They have the yellow core and the white around it, the yolk and the albumin. All eggs are much the same: The yolk is the nucleus _ the central command center _ and the albumin is the cytoplasm that feeds development if the egg is fertilized. It has little mitochondria or “battery packs” that energize the process.

Now, suppose you want to clone yourself. You get a woman’s egg _ an ovum _ and you take out its nucleus. You then insert the nucleus of one of the cells from your body. This is what they call somatic cell transfer.

Unlike sperm and egg fertilization, cloning creation needs a little help, usually an electric shock to get the mitochondria “battery packs” started. Theoretically, the cloning creates an embryo just like you. It has not worked yet, but it might.

Scientists want to use cloning techniques to create embryos so they can harvest stem cells from them. This is what they call “therapeutic cloning.” Congress is beginning to think cloning is a good idea. In June, a cloning bill lost, but it got an awful lot of votes.

It is all about human embryonic stem cells.

Researchers use “spare” human embryos obtained from fertility clinics, and eventually want to move to “therapeutic cloning.” But there are two problems: Human eggs are tough to come by, and scientists have not had much luck with them anyway.

So, two researchers in England have found their own solution. They want to fuse the nuclei of human cells with animal eggs that have had their nuclei removed. Remember, the nucleus is the control center _ it contains most of the genes _ and so whatever the result, it is likely to be more human than not.

Which is what the researchers want, because they hope the creation will grow enough for them to get some stem cells from it. That takes about five or six days until it reaches the blastocyst stage, by which time it is fairly well defined.

I am not making this up. Creating human life in order to destroy it is bad enough. We are on the brink of a high-tech interspecies world.

Interspecies concepts can go both directions: animal cells in human eggs or embryos, human cells in animal eggs or embryos. Either way, the normal reaction is “you want to do what?”

There’s a bill pending before the British Parliament about these things and more. Of course the Catholic bishops in the United Kingdom are having none of it. They say what is proposed and what could come about is an affront to human dignity. Catholic teaching is clear: You should not be doing this at all.

The brave new scientists want to make a being _ the bill calls the process “creation” _ toward whom moral obligations are unclear. Catholic moral theology calls this at the very least a “moral perplexity.” You should not have done this in the first place, and after you do there is no really correct path.

Except the path of common sense.

Both so-called therapeutic and interspecies cloning _ in China, in South Korea, in Spain _ are floating toward North America. How has the world become so foolish about creation? Is the United States next to ride this dangerous wave?

Let us hope that common sense prevails.

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)

KRE/LF END ZAGANO725 words

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