- Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst
College and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in
Washington and provided this commentary that may be of interest.


Why advocate research that destroys nascent human beings?


Barry Goldwater remarked years ago that filling in as a "guest host"
for Johnny Carson was rather like jury duty: At some point almost
every American would have to do it. In our own day, the equivalent may
be appearing on Larry King Live. That task fell to President Bush and
his wife earlier this month.


King could not resist raising the issue of the supposed "ban" on
research involving stem cells while interviewing the First Couple. Of
course, there has been no ban on that research; there has been only a
reluctance on the part of the president and Congress to promote such
research with public funds when it involves the destruction of human
embryos. Larry King has rubbed shoulders with Nancy Reagan and her son
Ron in taking up this cause, claiming that research on embryos will
deliver other people from the Alzheimer's disease that afflicted our
late president. President Bush, bless him, spoke from his heart in
conveying his concern for the "culture of life" and explaining his
reluctance to cross certain moral boundaries. But the conditions of
speaking on Larry King Live, with compression, before a mass audience,
does not exactly lend itself to extended explanations. What may be
needed is a kind of five-minute account that even Larry King and Ron
Reagan can understand. And so let's try it.

In the first place, even Larry King is not likely to hesitate when the
problem is framed in this way: Given a choice between a therapy that
happens to be lethal for human subjects and one that is not, wouldn't
we be inclined to favor the therapy that is not lethal? Wouldn't that
be even more the case if that non-lethal therapy turns out to be
vastly more promising, and far less speculative, than the lethal
therapy? Stem cells drawn from adults have already yielded some
striking achievements, and they do not require the killing of the
person from whom they are drawn. The extraction of stem cells from
human embryos does, however, result in the destruction of the nascent
human being in the stage of an embryo (as opposed, say, to his stage
as an undergraduate).

By now we have all absorbed the familiar complaints against the kind
of science performed so directly, and without inhibition, by German
doctors during the Second World War: If we want to know how long
pilots could survive in the cold waters of the Atlantic, why not just
dunk some human beings in water brought to that temperature and find
out directly? As it so happens there were Jewish prisoners at hand
who, as the saying goes, were "going to die anyway." Why not use them
to find out what science was keenly interested in knowing?

Yet the fact that the prisoners were marked to die did not dispose of
the question of whether they were being sent to their deaths rightly
or wrongly. And even apart from that question, the scientific
community seemed to recoil from the prospect of performing, on
non-consenting human subjects, experiments highly likely to be lethal.

As everyone used to understand, then, there were moral constraints
that properly limited the passion of science to "know."

Of course, the argument arises over the question of just why the human
embryo should be regarded as a human being, with the same human
standing as those human beings we see all about us. If this were
merely a matter of "belief," then for John Kerry the issue could be
settled already. For he has already affirmed his belief - fortified,
he claims, by his religion - that life begins at conception.

But happily there is a truth of this matter that does not hinge merely
on "beliefs." What Kerry curiously affirms as a matter of mere
personal belief happens to be the plain fact contained in every
textbook on embryology and gynecology. Twenty years ago the Senate
Committee on the Judiciary undertook a survey of the leading books in
the field, and quite remarkably found a thorough consensus on the
science of the matter. Twenty years later the consensus remains the
same: Human life begins with the union of the male and female gametes
to form a unique being, with a genetic definition quite separate from
that of the mother and father. When we refer to the "human" embryo,
we've already answered most of the question: The organism never
undergoes a change in species. The offspring of homo sapiens is homo
sapiens, or a human being, from its first moment to its last. And as
the late Paul Ramsey once remarked so tellingly, there is nothing you
and I have, genetically, that we did not have when we were that
zygote, no larger than the period at the end of this sentence.

Try it another way: If I wanted to strike at that person known as John
Kerry, when is the earliest I could have struck and removed the
memorable person we have come to know? When he was merely boy-baby
Kerry, before he was even named John, he was clearly the same being.
Two days, two weeks, two months, several months earlier, in utero, it
was the same being filling out to the form that would later be
recognized as boy-baby Kerry. If we traced that being back, we would
be dealing with the same entity, with the same distinct genetic
makeup, all the way back to zygote Kerry. And one would think any
graduate of Yale would know at least this: If that zygote John Kerry
had been destroyed, the one we have come to know as John Kerry would
not have sprung from the next pregnancy of Mrs. Kerry. That zygote,
and only that zygote, was the one we have come to know as John Kerry.

All of this should be enough to settle the question, if indeed it
seems clear to both sides of the debate that we would choose a form of
therapy that is not lethal for other human beings. That leaning in
principle would be further strengthened by the results we have already
seen. Embryonic stem cells, in being so unformed, are highly
versatile. And yet they are also harder to control in their effects,
sometimes generating tumors and other less-than-welcome surprises.
Adult stem cells seem more stable, and when they are used to treat the
person from whom they are drawn they have signal advantages: There is
a vanishingly small risk of rejection, and virtually no risk of
transferring genetic and viral diseases. The differences are also
borne out dramatically in the record. One of my own students at
Princeton, Cason Crosby (now Cason Crosby Cheely), collected some of
the more striking examples in her senior thesis. Were she not
unavailable now, on her honeymoon, I would give the rest of the story
over to her. In her absence, I'll simply report the examples she
collected:

Adult stem cells healed broken bones and torn cartilage in a clinical trial.
They were responsible for the first completely successful trial of human gene
therapy, helping children with severe combined immunodeficiency disease to
leave their sterile environment for the first time. Adult cells from a young
paraplegic woman's own immune system, injected into the site of her spinal-
cord injury, cured her incontinence and enabled her to move her toes and legs
for the first time. (Reported in congressional testimony in July 2001.) In
June
2002, research confirmed that adult stem cells are more effective than
embryonic stem cells in blood formation; and a month later, Canadian and
Japanese scientists saw adult bone-marrow cells show significant immune
tolerance. The cells were not only incorporated into bone marrow, but also
into damaged hearts to help in repair. In July 2002, bone-marrow stem cells
were incorporated and differentiated into retinal neutral cells in an injured
retina. Researchers have used bone-marrow stem cells to grow new blood
vessels in the eyes of mice - a procedure that they hope might lead to
treatment for some forms of blindness in humans. Around the same time,
scientists implanted adult bone-marrow stem cells into children with
osteogenesis imperfecta, a severe bone and cartilage disease, and the stem
cells stimulated bone growth.

In the summer of 2002, researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital
successfully turned adult stem cells into insulin-producing cells that could
reverse diabetes. In February 2003, researchers showed convincingly that
stem cells transplanted from a patient's muscle tissue to the heart may be
able
to take over for cardiac muscle damaged by a heart attack.

The experience since then has amplified these findings and given
further hope to this line of research. In the face of such
developments, we must wonder just what fuels the passion for heating
up the presidential campaign by raising, to a high pitch, the issue of
embryonic stem cells. The motives must be various, but it seems clear
that for many of the partisans the drive to use stem cells from
embryos does not arise from a sober consideration of the prospects for
that research. For many, it appears, the passion for sweeping away the
moral reservations about stem cells is bound up with the argument over
abortion. The prospects for research are evidently far less important
than the possibility of proclaiming, once again, that the human
embryo, or the nascent human life, has no standing, and no rights,
that the rest of us need to respect.

- Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst
College and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in
Washington.

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