The Editor, Sir:

I wish to express my disappointment with English researchers at Newcastle University who recently reported that they have created human embryos carrying genetic material from three different parents.

Genetic science has great potential for either serving or degrading humanity. Its proper use requires moral reflection and the establishment of moral limits.

The new technique aimed at freeing humans of inherited diseases requires using the reproductive technology of in vitro fertilisation to produce embryos in the laboratory where they can be observed and manipulated.

New threats against life

Here, a relationship of domination of researchers over their embryonic subjects exists which not only opens the door to new threats against life, but is contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children.

Human beings are not raw materials that can be exploited or commodities that can be bought and sold. If a man takes on the power to fabricate man, he also takes on the power to destroy him.

The human being has the right to be generated, not produced, to come to life not in virtue of an artificial process, but of a human act in the full sense of the term - the union between a man and a woman.

Pure and simple, this latest method of genetic manipulation is nothing more than Frankenstein science.

I am, etc.,

PAUL KOKOSKI

pkokoski@mountaincable.net

Hamilton, Ontario.

Canada.