What's in the Fridge?

I meant to post this awhile back. On Right to Life Sunday my senior pastor quoted from an amazing court testimony that is worth the read.

Dr Jerome Lejeune a medical doctor and Ph.D. geneticist who graduated from the University of Paris and had been, for over 10 years, a researcher on the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, testified in a Maryland court house on the sanctity of life. Dr. Lejeune is the one who made the discovery of the chromosome link to Down’s Syndrome.

Here are some quotes to wet your appetite.

“Inside the chromosomes is written the program and all the definitions. In fact, chromosomes are, so to speak, the table of the law of life… There exist a lot of minute differences in the message given by father and the one given by mother” and every sperm and every egg carry different information."

“The minuteness (the smallness) of the language is bewildering because if I (brought into) the Court all the (DNA strands) which make up every one of the five billions of human beings that will replace ourselves on this planet, the amount of matter would be (the size of) roughly two aspirin tablets.”

“The amount of information which is inside the zygote, which would if spelled out and put in a computer tell the computer how to calculate what will happen next, this amount of information is (so) big that nobody can measure it."

“But what I saying is that the information which is inside this first cell, obviously to tell this cell all the tricks of the trade to build herself as the individual, this cell” (already has). And it is not information “to build a theoretical person, but to build that particular human person we will call later Margaret or Paul or Peter, it's already there, but it's so small that we cannot see it."

“It's what is life, the formula is there; if you allow this formula to be expanded by itself, just giving shelter and nurture, then you have the development of the full person."

“Now, I was very surprised two years ago that some of our British colleagues invented the term of pre-embryo. That does not exist; it has never existed."

Q.: Dr. Lejeune, let me make sure I understand what you are telling us, that the zygote (the first cell) should be treated with the same respect as an adult human being?

A.: I'm not telling you that because I'm not in a position of knowing (about respect or rights). I'm telling you, he is a human being, and then it is a Justice who will tell whether this human being has the same rights as the others. (But) if you make difference between human beings, (you are) on your own to prove the reasons why you make that difference. But as a geneticist you ask me whether this human being is a human, and I would tell you that because he is a being and being human, he is a human being… As a geneticist, I would say… as soon as he has been conceived, a man is a man."

What's in the Fridge?