Right, but then one has to ask the question if this is pain that we (humanity as a whole) care about or not.
We cause pain and suffering in hundreds of thousands of lab animals a year, not to mention our livestock, etc. While acknowledging that pain, we've determined it doesn't matter (or more precisely, that an animals pain has less weight in our moral/ethical considerations than equivalent human pain - if such a thing could be said to exist).
We've determined that any pain a fetus may or may not experience in an abortion is less meaningful than any social or economic pain the mother might experience (not trying to start a pro-life/pro-choice debate, here, but it's kind of hard to talk about this without looking at how we as a society handle abortion). What makes this different from using aborted fetal tissue? What meaning should we attach to potential pain in an organism created specifically for scientific study (assuming this was a living organism, which it doesn't seem to be, but I could be misreading the article).
Sorry for the rant, I'm still working out all the questions this raises and some of that spilled into this comment.
We cause pain and suffering in hundreds of thousands of lab animals a year, not to mention our livestock, etc. While acknowledging that pain, we've determined it doesn't matter (or more precisely, that an animals pain has less weight in our moral/ethical considerations than equivalent human pain - if such a thing could be said to exist).
We've determined that any pain a fetus may or may not experience in an abortion is less meaningful than any social or economic pain the mother might experience (not trying to start a pro-life/pro-choice debate, here, but it's kind of hard to talk about this without looking at how we as a society handle abortion). What makes this different from using aborted fetal tissue? What meaning should we attach to potential pain in an organism created specifically for scientific study (assuming this was a living organism, which it doesn't seem to be, but I could be misreading the article).
Sorry for the rant, I'm still working out all the questions this raises and some of that spilled into this comment.