Well No Kidding
There’s an oddity in that piece in the Indy yesterday about Stephen Hawking’s rebuke of the reactionaries on the stem cell question.
President Bush and some religious authorities, notably the Catholic Church, argue that the microscopic, four-day-old embryos from which stem cells are derived are potential human lives.
Is that right? I don’t think it is. Because surely everyone argues or rather simply takes it for granted that any embryos, four day old or four second old, are potential human lives. We know that – that’s not disputed. What’s disputed is what follows from that; what’s disputed is whether potential human lives should be as protected as actual human lives. So – why did the reporters put that ‘potential’ in there? To make Bush and the Catholic church sound more rational and reasonable than they are? To make people who disagree with them sound less rational and reasonable than they are? A little of both? Don’t know, but it’s odd.
As Marvin, the paranoid android put it:
“Life! Don’t talk to me about life . . .”
Life is what each of us (you, I, the pro-lifer on her soapbox) eats for breakfast
Every sperm and egg is a “potential” life. Are they all sacred? Are we obliged to ensure that every single one gets a chance at life?
Monty Python Rides Again!
But seriously, is that piece just a dumb journalist’s mistake, or do some people out there think that other people don’t think embryos are potential people? It would be my suspicion that that’s just what they do think, that godless scum don’t treat life as “sacred”, even while unpatriotically opposing the death penalty…
Human embryo or two month old kitten in a laboratory on fire – which do I save first…. hmmmm.
Unlucky Fried Kitten / Kentucky Fried Chicken. What’s the difference ?
Seriously though, one only has to read Ben Goldacre’s excellent Bad Science column in the Grauniad to see how much poor quality science reporting gets published regularly even in the broadsheets…