Xenotransplantation Quotes
This is a classic example of a legislator, concerned about the ethics and morality of certain types of scientific experiments, and not understanding the scientific meaning of the terms used, would also make illegal existing and important technologies and cures. In this case, he thinks of cloning as reproducing another exact human being, but we clone human cells every day to produce many of the beneficial medicines we use commonly. And the combination of animals and humans is common in many aspects of modern medicine. For burns the tissue of pigs is used to cover the wound and act as a scaffold on which human skin cells grow. There are millions of people in America and the rest of the world who are leading a normal life with a pig or a cow heart valve. There are ethical problems to be sure but most legislators have little clue as to what they are, and tend to want to outlaw whole areas of science out of their ignorance in in reaction to public pressure from others who do not understand what it is that they want to prohibit.
Some opponents of genetic engineering and Xenotransplantation (creating new animals by combining parts of different animals or adding parts of one animal species to another) cite this Biblical passage in their efforts to stop these new technologies. Yet both are well established and most people, including the opponents often do not even realize instances of it. For example, a large proportion of heart valve repairs in humans is accomplished by Xenotransplantation—replacing the defective heart valve with a pig heart valve. An entire line of biological research is being conducted by splicing the genes of a jellyfish that glows green under UV light into monkeys and worms to study the methods of genetic transmission.
