The news has been reporting about a research "development" whereby embryonic stem cells can still be used without killing the embryo. I am skeptical that this makes it ethical for a couple of reasons.
1. That embryo is still going to die unless it finds a mother to nurture it, although one could get stem cells from artificial insemination instances where this occurs in order to have children.
2. Could it be that if you put that stem cell in the proper environment (like a womb) it would grow into the original embryo's twin? Although I don't know much about these matters, I have been told that cloning is nothing more than twinning. Natural clones occur all the time. The problem with cloning is when people wish to clone at the expense of the embryo's life and well-being or assume that the twin is somehow not really human, so it is moral to use it for spare parts. Rubbish, I say, rubbish. Anyway, maybe that stem cell will never grow into a twin in which case this point is irrelevant.
6 comments:
John--
First, I found this article, The First Fourteen Days of the Human Life, to be very interesting, in terms of point 2.
But, perhaps more importantly, the news is now reporting about research that seems to allow us to get real embryonic stems cells, apparently without doing anything that smacks of killing along the way. You can tell from the comments that the site isn't necessarily too friendly to Christians, but I think the information about the research is interesting (at least what I can understand).
I guess I don't understand how the second article is different than the article I posted. Would you elaborate?
I'll try (though, quite admittedly, this is rather outside my area of expertise). As I understand it, your original article talks about taking a embryo (or whatever the technical term is), taking a cell out, and using that, dividing, to make more stem cells. Right?
The second article is about taking a cell from an adult human, and converting that into embryonic stem cells. No unborn children, no cloning, just cells very similar to embryonic stems cells. Are there moral issues here, too? Probably. But, at first blush, they seem a lot less concerning than any other method of obtaining embryonic stem cells.
John,
Your first point is valid. The second one confuses the stem cell with the embryo. A stem cell can potentially turn into any kind of tissue, but it is not the person any more than your arm is.
David's article seems to be suggesting that we might be able to make stem cells out of regular cells. An adult stem cell is not morally problematic (and avoids the immune resistance problem of embryonic cells). If we can make stem cells out of regular cells then this might be a viable option. That is not the same as "cloning" the individual (also known as Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer), which is problematic. In any case, I think it is a misnomer to say that they are making "embryonic" stem cells, since what they are making has no relation to an embryo. I suppose they are just suggesting they are more similar to the embryonic variety of stem cells rather than the (supposedly more limited) adult variety of them.
I am in the middle of moving so I will reply more thoughfully in a couple of days. Thanks for the feedback. Welcome Adam. Good to hear from you Paul.
Hey John, in response to your first point "1. That embryo is still going to die unless it finds a mother to nurture it...":
This situation happens all the time with invitro fertilization and by being able to harvest these cells without altering their life or death status one way or the other would now render stem cell research morally neutral.
If you want to argue that it is still wrong that the embryo is sitting in a lab not developing, then you have to argue that IVF is wrong, this option of harvesting stem cells is merely an adjunct to the procedure that is already legally happening anyway. It could be viewed as an incidental benifit of a harmful thing.
An analogy could be scientists utilizing the results of nazi expirements on humans - while immoral and must never to be repeated was very useful in some aspects and we can condemn it, but since it is already there, there is no sense to ignore what little good came from it.
Kaarlo
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