behold the power of connotation

Change the word "cloning" to the phrase "somatic cell nuclear transfer," and hey, presto! People are more likely to support it, in any context.

Kathy Hudson and her colleagues at the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC asked more than 2000 Americans whether they approved of deriving stem cells from embryos produced by cloning. For half of the sample they used the term "SCNT" instead of "cloning", and this raised approval ratings from 29 per cent to 46 per cent, Hudson told a meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in New Orleans last week.

If they call it "Dr. Scientician's Magical Cure-All," approval shoots up to 86.2%.

a new source of ethical embryos?

Stem cell research couldn't get more confusing.

Could it?

It could.

Stojkovic’s team, including researchers from the University of Durham, UK, and at Sintocell, a company in Serbia, investigated 161 donated blastocysts in total, some of them normal and others in the so-called arrested form. Of the 119 blastocysts which arrested early – having multiplied to no more than 10 cells – none yielded viable embryonic stem cells.

The only successful line came from 13 “late-arrested” blastocysts, which had stalled after multiplying to between 16 and 24 cells.

The hESCs were retrieved and grown in the lab on a layer of human “feeder cells” and nutrients. “In countries with a non-flexible policy, arrested blastocysts provide a more ethical source for research and hESC derivation,” the team say. “Our opinion is that all surplus and consented arrested and developing embryos, whether of poor or good quality, should be used for research or derivation of hESCs and not discarded.”

The controversy continues, however. Not everyone thinks the blastocysts in question were indisputably dead. “They are arrested, but still metabolically active,” says Stephen Minger, a stem cell researcher at King’s College London, UK. “So technically they’re still alive, and to spin it bio-politically as an ethical source of hESCs is completely misleading,” he says.

The last one didn't pan out, and there's no reason this one will, either, since its opponents promote the broadest criterion for "life."

embryonic stem cells without the pain?

If this pans out, it could virtually end the debate about ESCR.

Last year, Bob Lanza and his team from Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester, Massachusetts, demonstrated that stem cells could be harvested from mouse embryos without killing them (see Are all human embryos equal?). Now they have done the same in human embryos left over from IVF treatment.

The researchers employed a technique used in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) in which a single cell or “blastomere” is removed from the ball of eight to 10 cells that comprise the early embryo. The researchers were able to grow a stem cell line from just one or two cells from an early embryo - leaving that embryo viable. The cells are “pluripotent”, meaning they can grow into the three major tissue types (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature05142).

The obligatory skeptic, though, responds later in the article:

IVF embryos that have been biopsied for PGD have grown into normal babies, says Alison Murdoch of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. “However, it is not true to say the biopsy is not detrimental to the embryo,” she says. “Some embryos do not survive.”

Once the technique is refined, that may no longer be the case. At any rate, it's a potentially revolutionary development in a field that has seen far more hype than hope.

Update: As far as the end of the debate goes, Ed Brayton is slightly less optimistic.

John Lizza against the "biological paradigm"

(a work in progress)

Persons, Humanity, and the Definition of Death
John Lizza
The Johns Hopkins University Press
212 pages including index

Introducing his work, Lizza writes,

Whereas the paradigm treats human or personal death as a strictly biological matter, I hope to show that human or personal death is no less a metaphysical, ethical, and cultural matter than a biological one and that such considerations are necessary to justify any particular definition and criteria for death (ix).

Over the course of the book Lizza sets out a carefully constructed argument against the biological paradigm, and discusses policy implications of a nonreductionist framework in combination with value pluralism.

It is widely understood that technology forces us to make difficult choices about the end of life, choices predominantly framed in biological--more specifically, neurological--terms, since, as Lizza notes, modern ventilators and transplantation allow a human body to "live" indefinitely in the absence of higher neurological function. The former biological criteria of death--circulatory and respiratory stoppage--and their replacement, "brain death," both presume that

...[d]eath is a biological concept and not one that is socially constructed; the event of death is an objective, immutable biological fact that can be studied, described, and modeled but cannot be altered or contrived (2).

Lizza contends that this reductionist view ignores the complex tangle of metaphysical, moral, and social factors that define human existence. Lizza points out the ironic claim of the 1981 President's Commission's report that declared death to be "fundamentally a philosophical matter," but defined death in terms of mere organismal disintegration (via brain death). The "hard cases" such as Permanent Vegetative States, postmortem pregnancies, "locked in" patients, and anencephaly challenge this simplistic view.

The sum of Lizza's critiques of the various biological perspectives--all of which implicitly rely on a notion of organismal unity--is found near the end of the second chapter.

What we mean by as a whole is up for grabs. Many would argue that a person ceases to function "as a whole" when it irreversibly loses consciousness and sentience, even though other biological, integrative functions remain. Thus, what it means for a person or human being to function "as a whole" is tied to views about personhood and humanity and is not something that can be settled on purely biological grounds (32).

Lizza goes on to explain what those other grounds are.

The third chapter, "Concepts of Person," is highly useful. Lizza teases apart the three meanings of "person." First, "species meaning," the person as biological organism. (Those who hold that "person" and "organism" are synonyms most often argue that life begins at conception, though the reverse isn't necessarily true.) Second, "qualitative meaning," the person as functional characteristics such as the capacity for consciousness. Third, "substantive meaning," the person as individual, either as an immaterial soul in a body or as a material being with psychological properties. Lizza then explains how even bioethicists confuse or conflate these terms, often "talking past each other." Introducing the next chapter, Lizza notes, "The fundamental issue of what it is that dies has not been engaged" (51).

Lizza sets out two major contentions: that persons are substances (here he follows Peter Strawson and David Wiggins), and that persons are constituted by human organisms. To the first, Lizza adopts Strawson's view that only a substance view coherently explains why "my experiences are nontransferably mine" (55). Applying Strawson's analysis that both material and psychological predicates apply to the person, the loss of either means the death of the person. Lizza admits that this brings up a problem of relative identity: if a person is not identical to a human being, what are we to make of someone stricken by total amnesia or persisting in a permanent vegetative state? If a "person" is a substance, a "primitive," irreducible term, and not merely a phase of human development, then we must "construe the relation between the person and human organism as one of constitution" (62). But what, exactly, does this mean?

(more to come)

historical views of personhood

Joe Carter loathes Peter Singer's ethics; this is not news to anyone who visits his blog. But what is surprising is that Carter's moral position contra Singer, that personhood begins at conception, is relatively recent as an article of Christian dogma. N. F. Gier explains:

Many people have the impression that the Judeo-Christian position on abortion has always been as conservative as the current prolife movement. In his book Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Francis Schaeffer implies that abortion was an unthinkable practice in Christian countries before the 20th Century. The facts, however, are quite otherwise. In Christian England before the Norman conquest, the legal powers of a father followed the Roman tradition. A father could sell his own children as slaves if they were under seven years of age and he could lawfully kill any of his children "who had not yet tasted food."(1) Infanticide was widely practiced in all Christian countries until the 19th Century. The historian Lloyd de Mause quotes a priest in 1527 who said that "the latrines resound with the cries of children who have been plunged into them." (2) Criminal law of 17th Century France listed conditions under which a father had the right to kill his own children; and English midwives of the same period had to take an oath "not to destroy the child born of any woman."(3)

Historian Joseph Kett sums up this premodern view of the child: "Parents left their infants alone for long periods, seem to have been indifferent to their welfare, could not remember their names, refused to attend funerals of children under five, routinely farmed infants out for wet nursing, and argued in divorce proceedings, not over which parent should have the infant, but over which could send it packing." (4) We should remind ourselves that Kett is not talking about pagans here but church-going Christians.

We shall see that for Catholics the killing of an "unformed" fetus was not murder until a papal decree of 1869. Canon law on this point was not changed until 1917. But today leading Catholic philosophers and theologians disagree with this change. In Protestant countries the "forming" of the fetus was called "quickening," and abortions were permissible until that time. Even when stricter abortion laws went into effect in the 19th Century, very few cases of abortion of formed fetuses were ever prosecuted. Indeed, infanticide continued to be widely practiced, especially in the late 18th Century with the rise of the Industrial Revolution.

I am not yet ready to say that I find Gier's thesis fully convincing, but he certainly creates room to doubt that fetal personhood is an inherent part of the Christian faith.

Furthermore, as Blackmun points out in his decision in Roe v. Wade,

It perhaps is not generally appreciated that the restrictive criminal abortion laws in effect in a majority of States today are of relatively recent vintage. Those laws, generally proscribing abortion or its attempt at any time during pregnancy except when necessary to preserve the pregnant woman's life, are not of ancient or even of common-law origin. Instead, they derive from statutory changes effected, for the most part, in the latter half of the 19th century.

[*130] 1. Ancient attitudes. These are not capable of precise determination. We are told that at the time of the Persian Empire abortifacients were known and that criminal abortions were severely punished. n8 We are also told, however, that abortion was practiced in Greek times as well as in the Roman Era, n9 and that "it was resorted to without scruple." n10 The Ephesian, Soranos, often described as the greatest of the ancient gynecologists, appears to have been generally opposed to Rome's prevailing free-abortion practices. He found it necessary to think first of the life of the mother, and he resorted to abortion when, upon this standard, he felt the procedure advisable. n11 Greek and Roman law afforded little protection to the unborn. If abortion was prosecuted in some places, it seems to have been based on a concept of a violation of the father's right to his offspring. Ancient religion did not bar abortion. n12

Blackmun further explains:

3. The common law. It is undisputed that at common law, abortion performed before "quickening" -- the first recognizable movement of the fetus in utero, appearing usually from the 16th to the 18th week of pregnancy n20 -- was not an indictable offense. n21 The absence [*133] of a [**717] common-law crime for pre-quickening abortion appears to have developed from a confluence of earlier philosophical, theological, and civil and canon law concepts of when life begins. These disciplines variously approached the question in terms of the point at which the embryo or fetus became "formed" or recognizably human, or in terms of when a "person" came into being, that is, infused with a "soul" or "animated." A loose consensus evolved in early English law that these events occurred at some point between conception and live birth. n22 This was "mediate animation." Although [*134] Christian theology and the canon law came to fix the point of animation at 40 days for a male and 80 days for a female, a view that persisted until the 19th century, there was otherwise little agreement about the precise time of formation or animation. There was agreement, however, that prior to this point the fetus was to be regarded as part of the mother, and its destruction, therefore, was not homicide. Due to continued uncertainty about the precise time when animation occurred, to the lack of any empirical basis for the 40-80-day view, and perhaps to Aquinas' definition of movement as one of the two first principles of life, Bracton focused upon quickening as the critical point. The significance of quickening was echoed by later common-law scholars and found its way into the received common law in this country.

Evangelicals like Carter mean well. They have to recognize, though, that respected thinkers within the Christian tradition, as well as long-standing common law, provide support for the position that legal personhood does not begin at conception--so, even if fundamentally misguided, it's not an "extremist" view. Oversimplifying the issue benefits no one.