I awoke one morning this month confronted with a large, red, black and white poster, clearly designed to alert me to some hysterical cause. Little did I know at that point that it was only one of 4 on my street alone; with 60 others dotted across Cork and Munster – I’ve seen them with my own eyes in Fermoy and Rathcormac. €60,000 has been spent on these posters, apparently; though whose money paid for them remains uncertain.
To evoke an immediate emotive response, the billboards prominently feature large images of foetuses in utero, despite UCC’s stem cells looking more like microscopic grey rice. They make a claim of ‘lethal research in UCC’, strong words indeed, more akin to Nazi human experiments than poking needles into lifeless goo. As the stem cells in UCC’s research are imported from abroad, this ‘lethal research’ claim is incorrect and misleading – the stem cells are gathered from situations where ‘the life/death decision has already been made’ – that is, the same criteria for cadaver research. As you can imagine, claims that medical research on donated bodies by UCC students and research partners was ‘lethal’ would be thoroughly misleading. This is, of course, exactly the purpose of the campaign.
