The Enemy of My Enemy is ... My Enemy

Panos Zavos is on everyone's list of the top five, um, eccentrics in the human cloning race. He's fooled millions - twice - with promises that the first human clone's birth is imminent, and with preposterous claims about his own skills at cloning. He would be funny, if he weren't so dangerous. The emergence of Zavos has done more than anyone to convince the world that scientists who work with nuclear transfer are crazy. For example, today's British papers are all reporting that "cloning pioneer" Zavos is accusing Britain of "promoting infanticide." You'll love this:

[Zavos] branded UK rules governing reproduction as “super-conservative” and warned they were forcing many adults into having multiple abortions because it was illegal for them to choose the sex of their baby. He said British couples were visiting his clinic for “family balancing” treatments, having terminated a number of pregnancies because the gender of their unborn baby was not what they wanted. At the Kentucky Centre for Reproductive Medicine and IVF, where Zavos is associate director, treatments offered include pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, where the sex of embryos can be screened to ensure couples have a child of the desired sex.

You just know sex selection advocates want to stuff this guy into a small, dark closet ...

Female Foeticide: An Indian Response to the Sex Selection Debate

Not to rehash a point but this week's news around the entire globe has included one headline story after another out of the World Congress on Bioethics in Sydney, Australia. There have been seven major stories and five radio interviews since I first mentioned the new international visibility of these meetings. I'm betting that much of the debate among bioethics pros is going to move in the direction of IAB. Today's big story is the reaction in Calcutta to the repeated arguments by scholars from other countries that Indian sex selection must be disallowed.

Sex Selection Mass-Produced

John Robertson comments in this East Bay express piece on the increasing advertising of MicroSort sperm sorting for sex selection.