Stem Cells: The Masters Are Finally Free!

Shameful Emancipation

“Hallelujah, this marks the end of a long and repressive chapter in scientific history,” said stem cell researcher Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass. “It’s the stem-cell Emancipation Proclamation.”

It’s here.

So much for “restoring scientific integrity.” That’s right, the scientists – the masters – are finally free. Emancipated to more effectively and rampantly confine, shackle, and strip for parts the weakest and most vulnerable of the human community – human organisms at the earliest stage of life – the slaves.

That’s classy: hail Obama’s move tomorrow as a virtuous and courageous exclamation of freedom. Lanza, your parallel is folly. And worse, I fear your analogy is purposefully backwards: the slavemaster is declared free. Free from that dastardly, cursed concept of ethics; free from that burdensome and annoying responsibility for the weakest of our human family.

Finally right and wrong, the metaphysics of the person and the nature of humanity are no longer burdens to the scientist. Observe carefully:

“Public policy must be guided by sound scientific advice,” said Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, discussing the order and memorandum Sunday.

Melody Barnes of Obama’s Domestic Policy Council added that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will set standards for federal science advisers, insulating them from political interference.

Noble Harold, and what shall guide your scientific advice? Will your Council also be insulated from ethical interference?

Needed: A Different Conversation
As long as the conversation continues to be about “science” – the usefulness of these “clumps of cells” – such critiques of embryonic stem cell research will continue to be ridiculed as anti-science, misinformed, and even evil. “How could you stand in the way of CURES!?! Precious CURES! Health! Wellness! Better-than-wellness! Limitlessness! Nay – immortality!”

To which, I wonder, “How could you stand aside at the pillaging of the weak and defenseless?”

I’ve railed for the last three posts on this: The conversation needs to be about the moral status and nature of humanity. Interestingly enough, the National Academy of Sciences has something to contribute.

“In medical terms, embryo usually refers to the developing human from fertilization (the zygote stage) until the end of the eighth week of gestation when the beginnings of the major organ systems have been established.”

Fertilization is conception, the only sensible point (scientifically, medically, philosophically, theologically, sociologically, ethically and politically) at which full-fledged membership to the human community should be granted. (That membership should grant the appropriate rights to humans 80 years after birth, 18 years after birth, 18 days prior to birth and 18 seconds after conception.)

I’m looking forward to this conversation. In the face of widespread disagreement, will we prudently give the benefit of the doubt (what little there is) to the entity in question: the embryo?

If you guys ever come to question my personhood, I hope you’d give that benefit to me, and not use a destructive percentage of my cells to inject into someone else. At least give me the choice my humanity secures, a choice that we currently do not respect among 21 (and soon to be hundreds more) lines of microscopic humanity.