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Amoral Ethics as Competitive Advantage: Korea's Temporary Cloning Crisis
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In the year 2000, I was invited to a speech by the then Minister of Commerce, Industry and Energy about the ten industries of the future that Korea planned to invest heavily in.
Nine industries on that list were the same bets Korea had had on its list before -- including flat panel development, semiconductor chips, aviation technology, etc. But the tenth item he discussed was "cloning."
While the Minister's comments were translated, I was stunned by the bluntness of one admission he made about cloning.
He stated: "Korea may have an advantage in the arena of human cloning because America and Europe will struggle with moral dilemmas about that practice which the Korean culture will not. This will give us an advantage over the U.S. and Europe."
I thought at that time that the Minister was right. It was well-known Japanese social anthropologist Chie Nakane who stated that Japan was neither moral or immoral -- but rather amoral. I thought at the time I heard this that Nakane's views perhaps applied to Korea as well -- and that this amoral pragmatism in business and technological pursuits was now being promoted in Korea as a "national economic advantage."
There is much more to the cloning story unfolding in Korea. The latest controversy in the previously thought successful cloning case is that the senior researcher, Hwang Woo Suk, faked data.
Bad researcher. But before the world gets all high and mighty about Korea's hiccup in human cloning, the fact is that Korea is racing ahead of most of the world on the cloning front -- despite this controversy -- and has made extremely larege national investments in this technological pursuit that will probably still pay off.
So, yes -- a researcher has stumbled over a set of "ethics issues." But the world that is now guffawing over this needs to remember that that was always part of Korea's national cloning plan.
Korea is no where near out of the human cloning business.
-- Steve Clemons
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You can find unethical research under a variety of rocks. This caused an uproar:
Bell Labs physicist fired for misconduct
Every individual country ought to ban human cloning. I think its evil. One reason they want to clone is to have organ donor farms. Count me out.
Steve, here was another fraud involving a Korean researcher, Columbia University, and a convicted crook. I brought it up not only because of its Korean connection but also because people need to be reminded.
Robert Morrow: no, "they" do not want to have "organ donor farms". Somatic cell nuclear transfer -- what Hwang claimed to have done -- involves cloning an embryo and keeping it alive for five or six days. And this is not some malleable amount of time: after that, it's no longer possible to derive embryonic stem cells from an embryo.
Steve: as you probably know, there are two forms of cloning. In one ("reproductive cloning"), you try to get a cloned human baby. In the other ("therapeutic cloning", or somatic cell nuclear transfer), you destroy the embryo at five or six days. The moral issues raised by these two things are extremely different: in the first case, the problems involve bringing a clone to term, which does not happen with SCNT; in the second, they involve destroying the embryo, which does not happen with reproductive cloning.
It's worth separating them. If you'd like more details, just email me: bioethics is my day job.
I haven't found a story that actually gives some facts on this yet, so my comment is limited by that.
It's self-defeating to publish faked scientific results, because someone will try to reproduce them, particularly if they're as important as these were. So you'll be found out eventually.
Come to think of it, the NYT this week suggests that the same thing is likely to be true of governmental lies and secrecy. [pseudo-naivete off]
That said, I agree that we shouldn't ignore that pseudo-religion used as a brake on science is a bad idea.
I think the difference here is in the different philosophies concerning the human spirit as it applies to this research. With a belief in a universal spirit, the destruction of a group of cells is not as ghastly to them as it is to Catholics and conservative protestants.
This is totally different from releasing bad information or the questionable ethics of accepting eggs from lab workers who might feel pressured to donate.
Some folks still haven't gotten over that whole Onan misfire.
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