This procedure, which is under rapid development, is being framed as a medical breakthrough by scientists who appear to be completely blind to the moral and ethical issues at stake in such a scheme.
"[This] is definitely the first time an actual whole human organ has been grown in an animal, and has sustained the life of that animal," explains Eugene Gu, the founder and CEO of Ganogen, Inc. in Redwood, Calif. "Our long-term goal is to grow human organs in animals, to end the human donor shortage." [1]
LiveScience.com reports, "The research shows that it is feasible to remove a kidney from an aborted human fetus, and implant the organ into a rat, where the kidney can grow to a larger size."
From the Ganogen.com website:
Study results have been published in the Jan. 22 issue of the American Journal of Transplantation.
The ethics question
To its credit, Live Science directly addresses the moral issues surrounding this technology, even offering quotes from a bioethicist who says the practice won't be tolerated. As reported on the website:Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at NYU Langone Medical Center, said the study itself did not concern him. However, "there is no way we're ever going to use fetal human kidneys or any other solid organs for transplant," Caplan said. "American society is morally uncomfortable enough about abortion that growing organs from fetal remains will never be accepted, and will be banned in state after state."
The researchers said they hope Caplan is wrong...
The Ganogen.com website does not appear to contain any ethics statement defining any limitations on how the developed technology might be used. It appears to company has likely not considered the ethical implications of its research. While there's no doubt the founders of the company have entered this realm with the best of intentions, they appear to be young, brilliant and naive, wholly unaware of what the roads to Hell are paved with.
Here's a picture, also from the Ganogen.com website, showing some of the organs they've managed to grow from kidney tissue harvested from aborted human babies:
Abortion farms and organ factories
Western medicine today is dominated by the attitude of "heroic interventionism" lead by "medical mechanics" who celebrate each other's abilities to grow, harvest and transplant organs across an ever-expanding list of animal and human subjects.But just because you can achieve such transplantation results doesn't mean you should. In the same way, yes you can genetically engineer food crops to combine insect genes with plant genes and release them into the wild, but it's probably not very wise to do so due to the very real possibility of self-replicating genetic pollution.
What happens if this new fetal tissue organ harvesting procedure becomes so successful that millions of customers line up to buy the new organs? You'd very quickly see for-profit medical corporations setting up fetal abortion farms to harvest their organs for the "organ factory."
Young women would be paid (or kidnapped) to get pregnant and have their unborn babies harvested for the organ tissue. Actually, this step is practically happening today as companies like Stem Express in Placerville, California, already sell aborted human fetal tissue for "medical research."
In Nigeria, a baby farm was already in operation where teenage girls were kidnapped and forced to be impregnated against their will, only to give birth and have their children stolen away for human trafficking profits. "Thirty-two pregnant girls were rescued from a maternity home run by a trafficking ring in the southern city of Aba," reports The Guardian. [2] "The girls, mostly of school age, were allegedly locked up at the Cross Foundation clinic so they could produce babies to be sold for illegal adoption or for use in ritual witchcraft."
U.S. corporations could then purchase the harvested aborted fetal tissue from such "baby factories" being run in other countries, then they'd bring the fetal tissue to U.S. facilities where large numbers of rats (which are mammals) are subjected to the torturous procedure of having their bodies cut open and implanted with the harvested human fetal organ cells in order to grow human kidneys.
Once the kidneys grow to a suitable size, the rats would obviously be killed to harvest those organs, which would then be transported to hospitals to be surgically transplanted into humans for profit. The mainstream media would dutifully celebrate the "lifesaving medical breakthrough" and describe the mad scientists as heroes for humanity.
The medical Matrix: turning a human baby into a profit center for medical corporations
If there's money to be made from harvesting the organs of aborted babies, make no mistake that there are corporations more than willing to profit from the blood money.Even today, western medicine does not consider a human baby to be "alive" until after it is born... even though an unborn child shows every sign of life that would normally be considered "alive" in a rigorous scientific context. The unborn baby shows a heartbeat, brain activity, cellular growth, nutrient metabolism, waste elimination, muscular movement and even demonstrates emotions and reactions to stimuli. Clearly an unborn baby is alive. This not deniable except by those who are intentionally dishonest.
But thanks to a medical system that can abandon all ethics and declare an unborn baby to be something less than a living human being, there's nothing stopping biotechnology corporations from harvesting aborted human babies for profit.
And because there's no moral boundary against doing this with one baby, there's also no moral boundary against doing this with millions of babies in an "abortion farm" organ harvesting operation carried by a public company with its own stock symbol on Wall Street. Who knows, maybe your favorite retirement mutual fund will buy some shares, too, because all that matters are the earnings per share, right?
Here's a picture of a modern-day chicken meat factory. Replace the chickens with human babies and you begin to get an idea of the future where medical science operates without human ethics:
Watch The Island movie for a preview of how this might play out
In the sci-fi movie The Island, starring Ewan McGregor, the world's wealthy elite pay a biotech corporation to raise human clones in a medical facility as "living organ banks." Those human clones are later killed to have their organs harvested for transplantation into the paying customer.Much like in our own world today, the clones are controlled through a system of total media propaganda. Regular media broadcasts remind the clones that it's unauthorized to venture outside the city because the entire world has been destroyed in a nuclear war and is now contaminated with radiation, they're told. This is conducted in exactly the same way citizens of our modern world are scared into government compliance through totally fabricated or engineered stories of terrorism.
When clones are ready to have their organs harvested, they are told they've "won the lottery" to retire in luxury on a tropical island. In reality, they are euthanized and cut open to have their organs harvested for corporate profits.
This scene from the film shows one clone waking up during the organ harvesting procedure and attempting to escape:
The cloned citizens of The Island are brutally controlled by the corporation and forced to live a life of total obedience and conformity. Even their diet is rigorously controlled by the corporation, but not out of any desire to promote health. Rather, it's a desire by the corporation to make sure its "product" remains healthy, harvestable and sellable.
All along, the cloned humans -- which are considered corporate "property" -- are kept wholly oblivious to the real world and told how lucky they are to be the last of the survivors of the nuclear war (which never happened). This is the modern-day equivalent to President Obama telling us all how good the U.S. economy is doing and how lucky we are to be living in America.
What was once sci-fi may soon be reality
The greatest problem with science today is that it almost entirely conforms to corporate interests. As a result, it has no respect for ethics or morals. Whatever makes the most money becomes the new "science" of the day, regardless of the implications for human suffering or widespread tragedy.Tinkering with life -- via genetic engineering, mass deployment of agricultural chemicals, cloning or organ harvesting -- is a territory fraught with ethical landmines. But motivated by greed, corporations will drive humanity right through a landscape littered with such landmines, oblivious to the violations of ethics, human rights or environmental integrity they are unleashing.
Make no mistake: If it were medically feasible right now to generate millions of dollars in transplant profits from the body of a two-year-old infant, the biotech corporations would have already declared two-year-olds to be "not yet human" and there would be massive farms running right this very minute harvesting organs from two-year-olds. Any person who protested the practice would, of course, be instantly labeled, "anti-science."
Case in point: There's money to be made right now from injecting two-year-olds with toxic metals such as mercury and aluminum, both of which are still intentionally manufactured into vaccines. Any person who protests the injecting of children with mercury is immediately labeled "anti-science" today, even though the science clearly says mercury is toxic to human neurology. Calls for removing neurotoxic substances from vaccines are met with derision by the vaccine industry, which insists all children should be injected with dozens of vaccines no matter how toxic the ingredients in them.
The exploitation of children's bodies has always been a profit center for medical corporations, and human organ harvesting, growing and transplantation may simply be the next step up for an industry deeply rooted in the evil that comes from ignoring medical ethics while prioritizing medical profits.
In effect, we are all living in The Island and being lied to on a daily basis about what's real. The truth, it turns out, does not support the profit interests of the all-powerful corporations.
Sources for this story include:
[1] http://www.livescience.com/49503-human-kidne...
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/jun/02/n...
[3] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399201/
No comments:
Post a Comment