Cloning for dollars: morality & the market for stem cells

Here we go again: another round of debate about the merits of embryonic stem-cell research. Recent headlines reported a "break-through" in South Korea, where scientists extracted stem cells from embryos created by the injection of DNA from the cells of patients into eggs from which the DNA had been removed. With a bit of Orwellian newspeak, the scientists described the entities as "nuclear transfer constructs" rather than early embryos, and avoided the language of "cloning" altogether. Their experiment, however, was in effect the human version of the process that began the life of Dolly, the cloned sheep. Within a few days of that reported success in South Korea, the House of Representatives passed a bill to allow federal funding of new stem-cell lines from the reported four hundred thousand frozen embryos currently "left over" from in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures, a measure President George W. Bush has threatened to veto.

As a Catholic, I'm well aware of the church's teachings about IVF and the unacceptability of destroying embryos for stem-cell research. But my argument is not over the merits (to me obvious) of standing firm against the destruction of embryos for instrumental purposes. My point is, rather, to note the way that largely unsubstantiated claims for "progress" trump other serious concerns.

Little has changed since Commonweal's editorial "The Stem-Cell Sell" (August 17, 2001). Most responsible researchers concede that clinical applications of embryonic stem cells in human trials, if they occur at all, are unlikely to cure those now suffering from various life-threatening diseases. Indeed, the rhetoric from proponents sounds remarkably similar to the arguments in favor of fetal-tissue transplantation in the 1990s, claims that now ring false. By contrast, during the past thirty years, there have been more than fifty clinical applications in humans of adult stem cells, primarily from blood and bone marrow. In addition, recent animal studies and several human clinical trials have achieved promising results in repairing damaged organs and in "tweaking" specific types of adult stem cells into other sorts of tissue. While the debate is sometimes described as a contest between "science" and "ideology," that's untrue. There's far too much ideology at work in the claims of embryonic stem-cell proponents, and plenty of solid scientific success achieved with nonembryonic alternatives, such as adult and umbilical-cord stem cells, to which ideological opponents can point.

Is there anything new to add to the debate? Actually, yes. The National Research Council of the Institute of Medicine has just published its Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem-Cell Research. While the report presents the scientific background to such research clearly and accurately, its comments on ethical and religious concerns are inaccurate. Especially problematic is the report's judgment that Islam, Judaism, and "numerous Protestant denominations ... do not recognize the human embryo before forty days after conception as an entity that should be accorded the same moral status as a person." Islam and Judaism, reflecting a premodern embryology, sometimes invoke that forty-day limit, but Protestantism does not.

A second report worth noting, Monitoring Stem-Cell Research, published last year by the President's Council on Bioethics, provides a thorough review of scientific developments, as well as a far more comprehensive and accurate analysis of religious and moral perspectives. Although the council is often described as conservative, this report exhibits a commendable fair-mindedness.

In reading these reports, I was struck again by two core tensions in the conventional wisdom about embryonic stem-cell research. First, supporters tend to emphasize implantation as the point at which to assign some moral standing to the embryo. At the same time, virtually all proponents accept the emergence of the "primitive streak"--the beginnings of the embryo's neural structure at about fourteen days--as a significant developmental milestone. However, as technology proceeds, the emphasis on implantation may trump the appearance of the "primitive streak" in the presentient embryo, because experimentation on umimplanted embryos at later stages may be touted as preferable for some clinical applications. Second, if the process used to achieve the reported success in South Korea yields further real results, it seems unlikely that the prohibition against cloning in the current House bill will hold. Why do most proponents of embryonic stem-cell research limit their arguments to the use of "spare embryos" from IVF rather than calling for the creation of cloned embryos expressly for research? The putative merit of so-called therapeutic cloning, after all, is that the stem cells of such embryos are not susceptible to tissue rejection.