The Rambler and "Thought for the Day"

I normally grumble when the Today Programme interrupts its current affairs with "Thought for the Day". But I listened to  Rev. Dr. Allan Billings' contribution on 31st March with increasing interest.
He adopts the same position as I do. In a short paragraph below,  he demolished the idea that Cardinal O'Brien and  other members of the Catholic Church  were peddling over Easter . They   cannot discriminate between the few cells of an embryo and a mature human life.

"The objection to creating embryos is on the grounds that an embryo is a human life and should be accorded the same rights as mature human life. I find this unconvincing. To treat a microscopic bundle of cells as if it were a mature human being seems to me to be a failure in discrimination. An acorn may be a potential oak tree, but there is a difference between the two."

This is an important issue. But it seems that the debate is being conducted with little or no knowledge of what actually is being proposed- what those scientists at Newcastle University are up to.
The best starting point is the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority's (HFEA) booklet " Hybrids and Chimeras available from their website here (in pdf 880kb).

Whatever your view, the idea that human/animal embryos  will create  "Frankenstein"or some other kind  of   monster is just  plain nonsense. Within  eight pages  of the HFEA's booklet  the science is described in fairly straightforward language. As a non-scientist, I even ended up with a basic understanding of the difference between mitochondrial and nuclear DNA!

Comments

[Brian Barder]

I too was struck by the good sense and economy of this devastating dismantling of the entire Roman Catholic doctrine on abortion, contraception, "the right to life" and the rest of the muddle-headed mumbo-jumbo. Unfortunately the inability to distinguish between a fertilised egg (or even a not-yet-fertilised egg) and a human person has contaminated the thinking of many otherwise sensible people besides the Roman Catholics: all those, for example, who unthinkingly accept the dangerous and unsustainable proposition that abortion should not be allowed beyond the point at which the foetus has become 'viable'. I have tried to deal with that particular nonsense here.

Brian B.
http://www.barder.com/ephems/