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Apples and Oranges
libfemme ( 04/14/2004, 11:36:54 )I'll pull out the only part I might quibble with, the rate of failure.Remember you are citing an average. An average is calculated by taking the sum total of attempts and dividing it by the sum total of successes. But your perimeters are worldwide and timeless. Are you including in the total of attempts every attempt made before 1997? And what constitutes an attempt in your total? Every amateur grad student who attempts to clone frog's eggs in a university lab?There is no cost to frogs eggs, no downside to how many frogs or eggs you destroy. Frogs are dissected in thousands of junior high schools in america. They're eaten in hundreds of restaurants. Why would any grad student, or his advisor, worry about the efficacy of the methods he employed to clone, or to put it more specifically, while learning to clone?Physicans who practice medicine on humans dissect animals before they dissect human cadavers, and they dissect cadavers before they perform surgery. Would you average in every practice dissection done as a student against a physicans over all surgery success rate on human patients? Is that a fair comparison?So just what is it you are comparing when you cite a 90% failure rate? What are you measuring?There are and have never been rules or prohibitions about procedures on animals. There has never been the same rigorous laws and expectations but on that time of work versus what licensed physicans do. I dare to venture that veternarians lose a great deal more of their patients than physicans working on humans do and with far less malpractice costs. Would you average together patient mortality rates of veterarians and human doctors to come up with the nation's infant mortality rate? Would that be a meaningful number?What is more physicans in private practice in the fertility field deal with human eggs every single day. Many have been in the fertility business for the last 25 years that IVF and that assisted reproduction techniques have been available to patients.Embryo research is new for many University animal cloners just getting into a new biotech field. But working with human embryo's is not new to physicans in private practice. You're comparing apples to oranges. A far better comparison is current IVF success rates to what success rates were 25 years ago. Are there more losses than with natural conception? Maybe, maybe not. We don't have a way to count the natural failures. No one counts the number of embryos that fail to implant when a natural couple attempt to conceive over several months. That takes place invisibly, inside a woman's body. What can't be seen, is assumed not to happen. But with assisted reproduction you take that egg out of the woman and into a petri dish and you can see exactly what happens and when. Are you so certain that the eggs that failed in the petri dish would have been viable if they had been fertilized in vivo? Think again. What is the viability rate of normal conception?Embryos die more often than they survive. Nature makes them by the billions. Most species fertilizes far more embryos then can reasonably be expected to survive or be supported in the environment. Humans are no different to nature. It is quantity, in lieu of quality, that nature relies on to keep the human species going. We have not improved on Nature's embryos. We are just waiting to see which ones Nature has made viable.Why should we hold human cloners to a 100% success rate when nature isn't capable of that? We live with a natural success rate far less than 100%. No one weeps for the failed pregnancies of women who take 3, 5, 10 months to conceive. They are not branded criminals for destroys so many embryos. How can you blame the natural death of every embryo on the fact that its now visible? Because that's all it is.The success rate of human babies born via cloning will be far greater than Singapore success rate in cloning mice. If for no other reason than human babies are valued more than mice. It is faulty logic to compare the two. It is further faulty logic to assume that any rate of failure is unacceptably high, without first desiding what rate we implicidly already find acceptable in natural conception, and applying the same standards of judgement on people.
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