I’m pretty firmly closety about most of my viewpoints on genetic ethics, because it saves me all kinds of heated arguments with people who are wildly passionate about the topic, but significantly stupider than I am, but it’s time to open that door a wee crack, methinks.
The Observer has reported that British scientists have succeeded in bringing dead stem cells back to life, appropriate for development into stem cell therapies.
Scientists working at a British laboratory have achieved one of the most controversial breakthroughs ever made in the field of stem cell science by taking cells from dead embryos and turning them into living tissue.
The technique could soon be used to create treatments for patients suffering from diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, the researchers say. The breakthrough has been hailed by many scientists and ethical experts because it could circumvent opposition to stem cell experiments.
‘This should get round opposition to stem cell science because live embryos will no longer need to be used in all experiments,’ said Professor Miodrag Stojkovic, the researcher who carried out the experiments at the Centre for Stem Cell Biology at Newcastle University last year…
Scientifically, this is a huge step. Ethically it looks like one, but it may actually be nothing more than playing the shell game with life and death.
My biggest problem with all therapies that use human tissue is that the profit motive in the States, among many other markets, provides positive incentive for what you might call “tissue development” (pregnancy/embroyo culture) as well as “donation,” (abortion/diversion of cultures) not to mention obfuscation on the part of agencies accepting such donations.
What the hell am I talking about?
As long as there’s a market for stem cells, there’s a potential profit motive for abortion or fertilizing eggs and then preventing them from growing into babies, simple as that. In some countries the sale of tissue or rebate of medical services to the individual might be an option. In some countries the doctor might just say “we’ll take it away” and turn it right over to a capitalist corporation in return for money, product, or services including lobbying.
We have seen this with the market in cadaver tissue; we’re all a little more skeptical and nervous about signing that “organ donation” card, rightly or wrongly. Nobody wants to be reincarnated as Paris Hilton’s new ass in twenty years.
As long as the tissue is worth something on the open market, medical decisions will be coloured by this, either on the part of the individual patient or on the part of the organizations providing services either to the patient or the doctor. And I just don’t think this is morally justifiable.
This, however, I can almost get behind. There’s no profit motive set against any kind of life in this situation.
Or is there?
The availability of dead cells, of course, depends upon the production of living embroyos just the same as the availability of live ones does. Now if using dead cells is legal and live ones illegal, the cash incentive effect comes to bear on the maintenance of those embroyos’ health; inversely.
I acknowledge that using the cells of a dead embroyo is a vast ethical improvement over using the cells of a live one, but now that it may be economically feasable to culture and then allow to die a large number of embroyos, is the potential for harm not that much greater, because it is going to become that much more widespread, with an apparent ethical Get Out of Jail Free card?
‘In theory if an embryo is obtained ethically and a stem cell can be derived after that embryo has died naturally, then that will remove all ethical objections as there is no destruction of a living organism,’ said Josephine Quintavalle, of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, a Catholic campaign group. ‘We do not have objections to the use of donated tissue and organs in other areas of medicine…’
George Daley, of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, said the paper’s approach raised scientific concerns. ‘If there was something wrong with the embryo that made it arrest, isn’t there something wrong with these cells? We don’t know.’
However, Stojkovic‘s work was given strong backing by Donald Landry, at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York, who called the work an important addition to the field. ‘Regardless of how you feel about personhood for embryos, if the embryo is dead, then the issue of personhood is resolved,’ Landry said.
‘This then reduces the ethics of human embryonic stem cell generation to the ethics of, say, organ donation. So now you’re really saying, “Can we take live cells from dead embryos the way we take live organs from dead patients?“‘
I just don’t think the people getting paid for the organ transplants should be connected with the people running the hospice; is that too much to ask?
raincoaster 
There’ s no profit motive to create embryos. There are more four-cell clusters jettisoned down the drains of fertility clinics each year than the entire scientific community could use up.
Possibly were one scientist to concentrate on a single line only obtainable from one source, there might be motive to pay. But human genetic material has one significant and central characteristic: it’s available everywhere.
Unfortunately, until we unplug the whole question of when “life begins”, this’ll just keep being a big bunfight.
There’s no profit motive to create embroyos? What about surrogate pregnancy, selling babies on eBay, etc? I’d say there’s a lively market. Certainly there are a lot of abortions, but their numbers are decreasing as the morning after pill has become available (relatively speaking, in some areas) and as women are increasingly becoming aware of the “poor woman’s morning after” which works almost as well.
All humans die, too; the world is littered with corpses. But there’s still an obvious profit motive resulting in horrific and repulsive actions by the weak and the greedy. Corpses are in far greater supply than stem cells, and still we see the sociological deformity. Stem cells, being far more valuable, have far greater potential as objects of ethical deformity (I’m going all Screwtape Letters on you, sorry).
How long will it be before vast slices of China, ferinstance, are turned into stem cell farms? Think about it.
Surrogate pregnancy and selling babies answers a much different demand. The beat way to possibly profit from stem cells is by actually doing something useful with them, complex stuff requiring a lab and a degree.
“Vast stretches of China” are unlikely to become stem cell farms as long as two conditions hold: 1) the supply of throwaway foetuses continues unabated from fertility clinics and 2) most of the western world continues to apply a light regulatory touch to such research.
The nightmare scenario to me is the same as that of genetic engineering: the possility that the willingness of the wealthy to pay for genetic enhancements will lead to a superclass of human.
Then how will I be able to tell myself from the rest of the herd?
What’s this “poor woman’s morning after” anyway–sounds like something one should avoid.
Go ahead and get “all Screwtape”. The Screwtape Letters is a marvellous book–especially for a 10-year-old Catholic boy. I reread it at thirty-some odd and I still remember the phrase: “I think they will give you to me now–a little piece of you”. Thrilling and terrifying all in one.
Throwaway foetuses are becoming scarce as people realize the monetary value of what they are discarding, and refuse to sign their rights away/reserve the right to sue for control of their DNA (see the case of the man who was hit with child support charges for a child concieved in vitro with sperm he’d donated…orally). The American/European supply is going to dry up in the next three to five years, maximum.
China, on the other hand, will do anything for money. And their one child rule means that lots of babies get aborted, many times the rate of the Western countries. This is the single greatest source of stem cell material, and it is going CHEAP, because stem cell researchers don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl, unlike Chinese families.
“Poor woman’s morning after” works just fine, is just as healthy as the regular morning after pill, but for reasons relating to the first paragraph in this post I am going to just not mention it.
The Screwtape Letters is a great book but Screwtape Proposes a Toast is perhaps more apt for our time. More cynical, more political, more contentious, more hopeful. Yes, really, they all can work together. Read the book.