EctoLife: A Cautionary Tale
Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology Emerita Trinity International University In the December 2022 TN-CBC newsletter article entitled Déjà vu all over again, D. Joy Riley drew our attention to the parallels between the recently released YouTube video EctoLife: The world’s first artificial womb facility, and the fake publicity for the movie GATTACA 25 years ago. The new video, while actually conceptual, presents ectogenesis, the complete development of a baby in an artificial womb, as a current reality. Once again, a number of viewers were fooled. Unfortunately, it is perhaps more realistic than we dare to think. In a revealing interview by Beau Davidson with the Ectolife ...read more
Knowing How to Treat Something Requires Knowing What It Is
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A.
Here’s a riddle for you: what do you do with the above pictured item? Do you melt it, re-form it, and use it for jewelry? Do you add it to a paint base and cover your walls? Or do you include it in a rice dish and serve it to your family?
Truthfully, you do none of the above. The gold-colored powder pictured above is not real gold; it would not make good jewelry. It is not pigment to add to your wall paint. It is certainly not saffron or curry powder to add to a rice ...read more
Response to NYT Magazine Journalist Kim Tingley
Sowing the Seeds, commissioned work by Carol Harkness for The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture. View the full-size image here.
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A.
In February, The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture made a public comment at an FDA committee hearing. The New York Times Magazine on 27 June published an account of that meeting about three-parent embryos. The author of the article conflates normal human sexual reproduction (i.e., having babies with a chosen partner) with genetic modification. She opines:
What often gets lost in the loaded language of the debate over three-parent babies is the fact that ordinary human reproduction ...read more
Lord Robert Winston’s Fertility Warning — TVNZ ONENEWS
Lord Robert Winston’s TVNZ Breakfast Interview is here.
Selling the Fantasy of Fertility — NYT Opinion
“Selling the Fantasy of Fertility”
By Miriam Zoll and Pamela Tsigdinos
11 September 2013
The Ovolution of the Three-Parent Embryo
Donor treatments for mitochondrial DNA disorders are ethical — Nuffield Council on Bioethics (Press Release)
http://www.phgfoundation.org/news/11991/
Philosophies, as well as Actions, Have Consequences*
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A.
Executive Director
29 February 2012
It was Horace Mann who said, “Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it every day, and at last we cannot break it.” If that habit is of thought, it becomes a philosophy. Whether that habit is of thought or action, there are attendant consequences. Let’s consider children in this light.
Whether one thinks that babies are commodities, “not yet persons,” or a heritage, those philosophies have consequences. Recently, Theresa Erickson came face-to-face with the consequences of viewing babies as commodities (wire tap recordings). Ms. Erickson, the author of ...read more
