The Amazing Vanishing Embryo Trick.(Advanced Cell Technology Inc.)(Brief Article)

It was revealed last week that Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) of Worcester, Massachusetts, a prominent privately owned biotechnology firm, has a plan to mass-produce human embryos. The firm also has a plan to render those same embryos nonexistent.

ACT is attempting to develop a technique to produce "cloned human entities," who would then be killed in order to harvest their stem cells, as first reported by Washington Post science writer Rick Weiss (July 12).

As Associated Press biotechnology writer Paul Elias explained in a July 13 report, "Many scientists consider the [anticipated] results of Advanced Cell's technique to be human embryos, since theoretically, they could be implanted into a womb and grown into a fetus. [ACT chief executive Michael] West himself has used the term `embryo.'"

But it looks like West and his colleagues will not be saying "embryo" in the future. ACT's executives are smart people who anticipated that many outsiders would see their embryo-farm project as an ethical nightmare. So ACT assembled a special task force of scientists and "ethicists" to develop linguistic stealth devices, with which they hope to slip under the public's moral radar.

As Weiss reported it, "Before starting, the company created an independent ethics board with nationally recognized scientists and ethicists... . The group has debated at length whether there needs to be a new term developed for the embryo-like entity created by cloning. Some believe that since it is not produced by fertilization and is not going to be allowed to develop into a fetus, it would be useful to call the cells something less inflammatory than an embryo."

"Embryo" is merely a technical term for a human being at the earliest stages of development. Until now, even the most rabid defenders of abortion on demand had not objected to the term "embryo" as being "inflammatory." But apparently ACT's experts have concluded that before the corporation actually begins to mass-produce human embryos in order to kill them, it would be prudent to erect a shield of biobabble euphemisms.

Thus, "These are not embryos," the chair of the ACT ethics advisory board, Dartmouth University religion professor Ronald Green, told the AP. "They are not the result of fertilization and there is no intent to implant these in women and grow them.''