A slight technical problem
Gordon Cheng / 1st August 2004
Buried in a Reuters report on promising cancer treatment results in mouse cloning experiments is this mischievous statement: “Many researchers want to try similar experiments with human cancer cells, but the administration of President George Bush forbids the use of federal funds for such study because it would involve the creation of what is technically a human embryo.”
Now what do you suppose the word “technically” is doing in that last sentence? Either the embryo would be human, or it wouldn't. This wouldn't be an attempt to distance us from the ethical questions involved in such research, would it?