Did G.W. make the right decision? (stem cell research)

Great Debates
21

Well, I have the compelling suspicion that Dubya didn’t make his decision on the ethics of the issue. He just did whatever he could to keep as much shit off of his political white robes as he could. Its hitting the fan and he ducked.

So on those terms, yea, he probably made the best decision he could for a politician. The man wants to be re-elected.

I know, I’m being redundant… I already said that in GQ.

But here we can discuss the ethics, because it all boils down to the unending debate about when a human becomes a human and is endowed with all the rights and spirituality of humanity. My opinion is that if it doesn’t resemble anything but a wad of microscopic fish eggs it ain’t human yet. There’s no seat for a soul yet. No rights or liabilities. It’s still just a very complex biochemical reaction. And I recognize that’s just an opinion.

But lately the debate about this, and human cloning, has turned to a focus on the potential of the fertilized egg. This week on Reason.com, Jacob Sullum wrote a very lucid article on human cloning, poking giant holes in opponents’ arguments that argue about potential. And he makes the essential observation:

I respect those beliefs, even if I don’t hold them myself. The point is that Sullum is saying, very respectfully, that the arguments about potential are specious. And I agree with him. It’s possible to take the “potential” argument too far. Witness Monty Python’s cuttingly satirical, but brilliantly accurate analysis in their Meaning of Life song, “Every Sperm is Sacred.” The point is, even when we talk about potential, we’re right back at the question of when a life becomes human. Where is the threshold?

No one seems to be making the observation that the Supreme Court has legalized abortion in the first trimester. This sets a powerful precedent that, at least legally, an embryo has no rights until it has advanced far beyond the point at which anyone wants to harvest it for stem cells. I know this logic carries no weight with Right to Life advocates. But does the fact that the embryo has never been implanted in a uterus grant it additional privilege, or less? Here is another question for debate.

And finally, while studying the details of human embryonic development, another interesting question struck me. When a fertilized egg divides the first few times, sometimes it divides into two embryos, and identical twins are born. Sometimes triplets, quads, or even quints are born. And what if division can be induced? So then what is the potential of a single fertilized egg? These are rhetorical questions. The truly interesting question is:

What if scientists can pry apart the two cells of a fertilized (or clone) egg to produce twins, let one come to term and use the other for stem cell therapy? Have we diminished the potential of this future person? What are the relevant ethical questions?

I think this is a fascinating fine point for debate.

And in the spirit of full disclosure, I’m a diabetic, and I have no ethical or moral qualms whatsoever in cloning an embryo of myself and sacrificing it to grow a new pancreas so that I may cure my disease. To me, it’s cloning an organ, not killing a person.

22

I can’t believe I just used Monty Python and the US Supreme Court in the same argument.

I think that’s worth a few style points! :smiley:

23

There was outrage that harvesting organs from executed criminals occurs in China. I don’t see the problem, for the same reason jshore said. If society is going to kill people, and violate their right to life, then at least make good use of the remains.

**Bughunter ** said:

Damn it there goes my recreational sex.
This is the problem confronted by the US Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. The old “first trimester” is entirely arbitrary.
I am guessing it will remain arbitrary until someone works out when sentience kicks in. But even then…this “potential” word…its so problematic.

24

I’m so with you on the cloning! I’m counting on having a brainless me at the ready should I require it!

And I did bring up the Supreme Court in the Pit thread I started on this topic. My point was yours: the law says it’s not a person, how is it has become one when the question is about something that benefits the entire human species? What kind of screwed up thought process arrived at that logic?

stoid

25

Modern technology allows us to clone a human being directly from a single somatic cell. Thus, when you shed skin cells, it could be said that you are throwing away “potential human beings.” I think the argument that embryonic stem cells are somehow sacred forms of life is absolutely ridiculous. They are nothing more than undifferentiated cells, collection of DNA, proteins, lipids, and other chemicals. No more human than any other bunch of cells.

Does the pro-life lobby actually think that a single cell or a small cell cluster contains a soul? If so, how many cellular souls can one person have? Do identical twins, which develop from the same zygote, share a single soul? I have never understood why the religious right thinks its OK to play with nature and violate natural selection by allowing infertile couples to conceive, but is horrified when someone suggests we use leftover cells to save existing human lives.

26

**
Oh no, I’m not considering something this sexist. If there’s going to be raping of dead women, there’s got to be raping of dead men too…

Personally, I’m happy with the decision. Of course it’s purely political, you wouldn’t ask a doctor to set the zoning laws (unless he was also on city council) would you? I’m torn on the stem cell issue- I feel it’s valuable if it can cure people, but I don’t want to see embryos created just to be researched on, and to me, this feels like the most middle of the road choice that could be made. No one’s thrilled, but there won’t be any riots, either.

27

Mennochio said this:

The embryos will never have the opportunity to become humans because they are put into the right environment. Isn’t a fish out of water still a fish?

28

…sorry, that should have been “not put into the right environment”.

29

I don’t understand why we respect these serious emotional, cultural, and religious attachments to the dead body but not to the embryo. I mean, from a scientific point of view, what’s the difference? Our society says we should respect the prisoner’s body because it was once animated by a unique and irreplacable human being. Our society might just as well say that we should treat embryos with some reverence, not because they’re human beings in themselves, but they represent the most fundamental origins of human life, and to commoditize those origins is to commoditize human life itself. Where would we be then? It’s just this kind of sloppy thinking that stands in the way of progress.

I have a question for you, now. Say that I come across a coworker who’s crying in her cubicle. I ask her why, and she says that she just had a miscarriage a few days ago. How would she feel if I said, “Hey, buck up there, little miss! All you lost were a couple of undifferentiated proto-human cells! Why are you sobbing like someone died or something?”

30

One fact to drop in on the harvesting of organs after the death penalty. An organ transplant can only occur when the organ comes from a person who was healthy up to or almost up to the moment of their death. If a person is going through a long fight against disease or even serious mental problems before death, the stress wears down their organs until they are unusable, meaning that they couldn’t be transplanted successfully. Since death row inmates are rarely healthy, either physically or mentally, their organs simply won’t do anybody any good.

31

I should point out that SF author Larry Niven made a rather horrific extension of what might happen if organ donation as a death sentance became commonplace.

As the application of donated organs and tissues became more refined, the demand for these resources grew to the point where the supply could only be met by establishing the death penalty for running a red light.

Yes, it’s an extreme application of slippery slope logic, but it clearly illustrates the ethical problem of using the death sentance as a source of donated organs.

32

Doghouse: there doesn’t have to be a scientific difference. There is an emotional difference, both for the living relatives of the deceased, and for everyone who has to contemplate what will happen to their bodies after they are gone. Those problems just don’t exist for a blastocyst.

Why do we have to keep searching for this ‘magic’ moment where a human comes into existance? Why not just accept that a human being goes through many developmental stages, and is treated differently by the law and society at each stage. By insisting that there is some ‘magic spark’ that makes you human, you run into extremes like insisting blastocysts should have the rights of humans, to insisting that a fetus halfway out of the birth canal is still not ‘human’ and can be killed for yucks, when 10 seconds later it IS human and you’ll be thrown in jail for years for harming it.

You know, we don’t even treat humans the same after death. Immediately after death the body is handled very carefully, and buried or cremated with reverence. It’s a crime to disturb the body. Years down the road, bodies can be moved, exhumed, examined, and even displayed for scientific purposes. King Tut is the only king that was left in Egypt - all the rest have their bodies on display in some museum or were destroyed by vandals.

There doesn’t have to be a magic moment for being a human - the reality is more fuzzy. Consider a standard demonstration of fuzzy logic: I have an apple. If I take a tiny slice off it, is it still an apple? Yep. But what if I take another off? And another? At some point, it’s no longer essentially an apple, but you can’t point to a specific instance where it stopped being one.

The way I see it, the rights and regulation associated with humans and their byproducts should be situational. Instead of saying ‘abortion is wrong’, why not just have a sliding degree of rights for fetuses as they develop, are born, are infants, then children, adolescents, and finally adults. Each stage is different and should be treated as such by the law. And that’s what we currently do, except we have this strange notion about some instant on/off switch somewhere along the way. Which has no basis in science.

33

A fish egg out of water certainly is not a fish.
I’m with the “he copped-out” camp.
But maybe he had to.
Peace,
mangeorge

34

My theory: If George was a Democrat, the phrase “copped-out” would be replaced with “did the right thing”.

Just a theory.

35

Let me make sure that I understand you correctly here. According to your understanding of the law, I could go to an elementary school, grab a first grader, slit his throat, and then argue in a court of law that the victim’s status as a relatively “undeveloped” human should be considered as a mitigating factor? In short, the law accepts your contention that a first-grader’s right to keep drawing breath is somehow inferior to that of an adult’s? That sure is news to me.

36

Who are you to say so? If a given society cherishes the seeds of human life and places attaches some reverence to them as the origins of us all, how can you use “science” to say that they’re wrong to do so? To put in perspective, do you think I could comfort a married couple who just recently suffered a miscarriage by saying, “hey, buck up kids, all you lost were a couple of undifferentiated cells. Let’s go out for some bloody marys!”

You might want to consider whether you yourself might be placing an artificial yes/no construct on this debate as well. Does an embryo have to be proven to be the exact biological and legal equivalent of a fully developed human before we can say that maybe it shouldn’t be treated as so much throwaway research fodder?

37

A first grader is more than just a clump of cells. He is a thinking, feeling, and biologically human creature. A clump of cells not even advanced enough to be considered a fetus is NOT. Once a human reaches a certain stage in FETAL development, it can be considered advanced enough to be considered human. What that stage is, I, nor I think anybody else, is certain. However, It can be agreed that a clump of 100 or 200 cells is NOT even a fetus, let alone a thinking, feeling human. Heck, that clump of cells doesn’t even have a brain, let alone a nervous system. Once a fetus reaches a certain stage of development(let alone birth) they are accorded equal rights with adults. That is why if you beat up a pregnant woman that is 6 months along in pregency, she survives but looses the baby, you still get stuck on MANslaughter charges. Not fetus-slaughter.
However, If a child commits a crime, they are not generally treated the same as if an adult commits that same crime. This is because they are not psychologically devoloped enough to be considered adults. This is what I think Sam Stone was referring to, not that they are defended by law inequally.

38

I wrote a response to this point as the boards crashed. I’ll include here only what hasn’t been addressed by other posters already.

Firstly, if your co-worker is mourning the loss of a blastocyst, then she is one sensitive mama. A blastocyst is a day 5 (post-fertilization) conceptus. In a woman with the hypothetical ideal 28 day menstrual cycle, maximum fertility is attained on days 14-15 of her cycle. Assuming fertilization occurs then, when she miscarried her blastocyst, she was at day 20 of her cycle. If her pregnancy had been sustained, she would have noticed a missed period by day 29-30. However, loss of a blastocyst occurs without evidence of there ever having been a pregnancy.

Additionally, there no method known to medical science to detect a sucessful fertilization at this stage. The most sensitive method (HCG testing) is generally postive by the first day of the first missed menstrual period.

A miscarriage, in contrast, must occur in the context of a known pregnancy.

Assuming that a noticed miscarriage and a destroyed blastocyst were biologically comparable, we still find many factors outside of the loss of a seed of human life that likely contribute to your co-workers grief.

[ul]
[li] This lost fetus was in her body. She was it’s nurturer, it’s protector. Is she thinking, “What did I (or didn’t I) do to contribute to the loss?” Since nobody is nurturing a blastocyst, this type of reaction need not apply.[/li][li] What’s her age, how many previous miscarriages has she had, how long had she been trying to conceive, what lengths did she go to to conceive, and how many living children does she have/want? She may not so much be mourning the loss of this little soul as the dawing realization that she will not bear children. Blastocysts sitting in freezers cannot contribute to this sensation.[/li][li] Does she have a family member with a history of lots of miscarriages? Maybe she’s worried this will happen to her as well?[/li]
[/ul]

39

What happens if you keep growing those cells in test tube?

At what point does the process breakdown and stop progressing naturally?

40

Stoid: <<<<I think that the position of people who have a problem with stem-cell research is, sorry to be so brutal and blunt: stupid. Amazingly stupid.>>>>

Hmmm. I think that looking at reasonable people who disagree with you on one of the stickiest moral wickets we have today–where there are educated, rational, and knowledgeable people who come down on both sides of the issue, and summarily dismissing their ethical concerns out of hand without explaination is, sorry to be so brutal and blunt: stupid. Amazingly stupid.
Sorry, we do live in a democratic republic. Compromise is the name of the game.

It’s a difficult issue. Let’s not pretend that it’s not. That just alienates moderates and gets liberals scoffed at and marginalized. Same thing on the other side of the political spectrum.

Ankh_Too <<Secondly, it was a political decision, not a scientific one. >>

Agreed. And it’s clearly the job of the President to make political decisions. Let’s not make the decision out to be more than it is: it is simply a limited decision about Federal funding. He’s not banning stem cell research outright–he’s just saying that there’s not enough of a consensus on the issue to warrant extracting money from taxpayers to fund something they may consider reprehensible.

>>There’s no rational scientific reason not to pursue stem cell research>>

This I disagree with, essentially because the underlying assumption seems to be that medical ethics are A. not rational, and/or B. not scientific, as in not part of science.

My own view tends to the idea that serious ethical thought ought to be woven inextricably into the fabric of scientific inquiry.

In this case, although I wouldn’t personally find research on a stem cell placed in front of me on a petri dish particularly troubling IN AND OF ITSELF, as a rational and curious kind of guy I couldn’t help but wondering “how did it get here.”

Kind of like a doctor who works in a government clinic who performs autopsies. There’s nothing wrong with performing an autopsy on someone with a single bullet hole in the back of his head, or even with harvesting organs, I think. But if that same doctor was presented with the same situation over and over again, with body after body coming to him with a single bullet in the head and a little blood-spattered note tied to the toe saying “Hi, doc. Here’s another one for ya. Please harvest. See you at the game tonight! --Max,” well, then it’s time for a rational doctor to start asking some pointy questions, and reassessing whether he ought to continue to be a cog in this operation. This doctor, one would hope, would recognize an ethical responsibility that goes beyond carving up the patient in front of him—a responsibility to assess and to help shape the process itself.

This isn’t just a slippery slope argument–there are real precedents around the world for this.

Well, here we are as a society presented with a body–in this case, a group of stem cells. Ok, fine. But how did it get there? And how many more stem cells are there behind it? And how will THEY get there? I don’t have problem with doing the research on this group of cells in front of me. But it’s time to take a hard, hard look at the industrial machine we’re going to have to create that will bring future stem cells to our table.

How do you establish “title” to human tissue, and when is title ceded? Is private ownership of a genetic sequence ok? With what caveats? Are we willing to create new “humans” or “proto-humans” (whatever you want to call them. The label doesn’t matter. The label has no bearing on the underlying ethics whatsoever. It’s simply a marketing decision to make for those with an axe to grind) for this purpose? Are we willing to tolerate, say, an enterprise that does nothing all day long but fertilize eggs and then sell them to the highest bidder? Should the tissue neccessarily go to the highest bidder? Or are there other considerations.

Are we willing to allow the practice of creating a human for the express purpose of then killing it (at whatever stage of development) and harvesting a custom-made organ for a wealthy person? Creating the organ from a stem cell someday in the future may be one thing. But suppose you needed an organ and had to develop a fetus to the 7th or 8th month in order for that organ to be useful–which we can actually do with present technology. How does that change the ethical equation? Is there a meaningful ethical difference between stem cell research and fetal tissue research?

Are there some illnesses, such as childhood leukemia, which are worth navigating the ethical shoals of biotechnology research in order to develop new treatments for, and other conditions, such as, say, hangnails, which are not?

Until we can come to something close to a societal consensus on these questions, then I have no problem with any president who says “No, I can’t fund this in good conscience.”

And let me reiterate that whatever one’s views, trying to argue that these questions don’t exist and don’t have to be answered is stupid. Amazingly stupid.

If we don’t answer them as a society, then these questions will be answered for us. Not by us, but by Amgen, Inc., Immunex, Inc, Genzyme, inc., and other big corporations.

I suspect most liberals don’t care much for that idea either.