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Ethical and Policy Issues in Human Embryo Twinning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2009

Andrea L. Bonnicksen
Andrea L. Bonnicksen
Affiliation:
A professor of Political Science, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, where she teaches classes in biomedical and biotechnology policy.
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Extract

In 1993, investigators from George Washington University (GWU) Medical Center separated the cells of 17 human embryos and produced 48 embryos, an average of three embryos for each original. The method, variously called twinning, cloning, embryo splitting, and blastomere separation, demonstrated that human embryos could be split to create genetically identical entities during conception. When publicized, however, the experiment brought to mind a different view of cloning repeated since the beginning of the new reproductive technologies. In the early 1970s, when research on in vitro fertilization (IVF) was in its infancy, commentators worried that cloning–defined as the duplication of persons–would be next, leading to a scenario of “boys genetically exactly like the father, girls like the mother, or individuals like some true or false hero of art, science, or sports, or like some demagogue or some saint.”

Type
Special Section: Designs on Life: Choice, Control, and Responsibility in Genetic Manipulation
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , Summer 1995 , pp. 268 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

Notes

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86. See note 74. 1994;4:276. NABER concluded it was not acceptable to freeze twinned embryos for the sole purpose of producing spaced twins. The group was divided on whether frozen twinned embryos should be transferred to the uterus if they were twinned to reduce the number of egg retrievals in in vitro fertilization and a birth had already occurred.

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