Promising news from the stem cell front:
Scientists reported Thursday they had developed a technique that can quickly create safe alternatives to human embryonic stem cells, a major advance toward developing a less controversial approach for treating for a host of medical problems.
The researchers published a series of experiments showing they can use laboratory-made versions of naturally occurring biological signals to quickly convert ordinary skin cells into cells that appear virtually identical to embryonic stem cells. Moreover, the same strategy can then coax those cells to morph into specific tissues that would be a perfect match for transplantation into patients.
The work, by a team led by Derrick J. Rossi of the Children’s Hospital Boston, was praised by other researchers as a breakthrough.
The article explains the new technique in more detail. I did find this quote to be an interesting commentary on the need for people to think more carefully about this issue:
Scientists hope embryonic stem cells will lead to cures for…a host of…ailments because they can turn into almost any tissue in the body. But they can be obtained only by destroying days-old embryos, which some consider equivalent to killing human life.
Some consider? Does any biologist contest the fact that the embryo is very early human life that will indeed be killed in the process of ESCR? Is anyone unsure about what kind of embryo is being killed? I suspect that if you were to push the author on this question, he would concede that of course it’s biologically human life, but it’s not valuable human life as older humans are.
But this is why people need to be more precise with their words. Let’s make it clear to people that we really are talking about human life at the earliest stages. Using the term “human life” to refer only to the humans who meet a preferred standard for value is a good way to perpetuate a bias against certain human beings (be they embryos or slaves), but it’s not honest.
A person who does not believe that every human life is valuable ought to use language that conveys this clearly so there’s no confusion in our culture about the judgment being made against certain humans. Contrast “valuable human life” with “non-valuable human life,” but leave the “human life” constant if all involved are humans. Something like this:
But they can be obtained only by destroying days-old embryonic human life, which some consider equivalent to killing valuable human life.
Then those who feel strongly about upholding the principle of universal human rights will more easily recognize when they are violating their own principle.
[UPDATE: The phrase "which some consider equivalent to killing human life" has been removed from the article at The Washington Post. You can still find it with slightly different editing here and here.]
(Cross-posted at Stand to Reason)
September 30th, 2010 | 10:41 pm | #1
If we’re going to get nit picky about terminology, let’s remember that “human” and “human life” also describe things that pro-lifers kill needlessly and on a daily basis. Living human skin cells are both alive and they are human, and, with just a little more care, pro-lifers could kill far fewer of them.
October 1st, 2010 | 5:35 am | #2
C.Ehrlich: the flaw in your argument is clear: a skin cell will remain forever a skin cell. Embryos, with time, become you me.
October 1st, 2010 | 5:38 am | #3
C. Ehrlich: an embryo is a human being, at its earliest stage of development. Skin cells are parts of human beings.
October 1st, 2010 | 9:56 am | #4
Actually, the predominant view among those who have no problem killing embryos is that they don’t become organisms until they’re implanted and start developing. I’m not sure if they’d say it’s alive. I suppose they might. Certainly it’s human, but so is my fingernail. The question is whether it’s an organism, and they shy away from answering that. They think there’s no sharp line between being an organism and not being an organism, and it’s not clearly one until it develops. I tried to press Ken Miller on this, and he didn’t bite. He wouldn’t answer the question, claiming that the vagueness of what it is to be an organism doesn’t allow for a clear answer.
I do think it’s crazy to say that I wasn’t once a yet-to-be-implanted embryo, though. It’s not as if the embryo stopped existing for me to come into existence. I was once an embryo. But the dispute with embryos isn’t as clear-cut among scientists as the dispute about developing fetuses. The latter are clearly human organisms, and people dispute whether they have full moral status. The former aren’t universally agreed to be human organisms to begin with, because they hesitate to say they’re even organisms.
October 1st, 2010 | 1:44 pm | #5
“Embryos, with time, become you me.” Actually, that’s the argument from the proponents of embryo research. They aren’t us, they just have the potential. The reality is, embryos ARE you and me, just a really young, tiny version, but exactly where they are suppose to be at that stage.
the valuable-human life distinction is helpful because it does get to the heart of the matter (great post, btw!). One other that is helpful is living human embryo vs. dead human embryo, because no scientist wants to work with dead ones.
Personhood is a philosophical category that science in and of itself can’t speak to thinks it can. The worldview of those in science has got to be a top priority for the church because horizontal ethics will always leave the embryo unprotected.
October 1st, 2010 | 2:41 pm | #6
Sarah, your point that “no scientist wants to work with dead ones” is exactly right.
Jeremy, it’s hard for me to understand how they can justify to themselves that it’s not an organism. It’s amazing the intellectual tricks people can play on themselves to avoid the truth when it’s inconvenient for them.
I just noticed that the “killing human life” line was removed from The Washington Post. I linked above to a couple places where it’s still out there from other online newspapers.
October 1st, 2010 | 10:46 pm | #7
The moral issue isn’t decided by these rather silly terminological disputes. There may be rhetorical advantages here and there, but no one who engages with such questions (e.g., is a fertilized egg cell an organism?) is really making a serious argument, one way or the other. I’d
October 15th, 2010 | 11:22 pm | #8
The reason why they’re hesitant to call it an organism is its non-living features. It’s not actually developing or doing anything until implantation. There are several stages between the initial penetration of the egg wall by the sperm and the implantation, and it’s not clear which one of them even counts as conception. So if conception is the initial point of moral status, it’s got no clear moment when it even is. That’s what biologist Ken Miller said was his reasoning, anyway, when I tried to press him on the question of whether an embryo is a human organism.
October 16th, 2010 | 12:13 am | #9
That’s interesting. But why do these people hang so much on “conception”?
All of these more or less biological concepts may themselves be rather vague, and, from a moral point of view, insignificant. Without settling any of the disputes about the extension of such concepts, we can still ask the important question directly–while still acknowledging all of the fine-grained biological details: at what point, and under what circumstances, does destroying the entity (described in all the fine-grained biological detail) become morally equivalent to murdering an adult human being? In other words, we don’t have to assume that normative significance attaches to any of the higher-level biological categories (why should we?).
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