Petri Dish Politics

Biotechnology will make it possible for us to live longer and better. So why are some people dead set against it?

Ronald Bailey from the December 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

Himmelfarb and Kass accuse those who favor biomedical progress of seeking immortality, as though that were a self-evident evil. But "immortality" is, in a sense, just a longer lifespan. Since 1900, lifespans worldwide have doubled, and most people think that achievement has been a great moral good. Using genetic techniques to increase human lifespans is not any different ethically from using vaccines, organ transplants, or antibiotics to achieve the same goal. Kass and Himmelfarb assert that human beings have been "defined by their mortality." But human beings are perhaps even better defined by their unending quest to overcome disease, disability, and death.

Indeed, all of the things on Himmelfarb's list of acceptable enhancements are "contra naturam." Is it not more natural to tear our meat with our hands rather than with stainless steel forks? Is it not more natural to die by the hundreds of thousands of tuberculosis, smallpox, or ebola? And is it not more natural for the lame, the blind, and old to die beneath the claws and teeth of predators? Himmelfarb does not make it clear how trying to "transcend" the dirty, nasty, brutish, and short lives of our ancestors undermines our humanity. Oh sure, a lower infant mortality rate--down from 300 or 400 deaths per 1,000 live births in the 18th century to only seven per 1,000 today--has deprived us of the chance to contemplate the tragic fleetingness of life and the poignancy of innocent death. But who among us really minds?

In an ironic linguistic twist, the pro-death opponents of substantially extending human lifespans have found their greatest allies among the pro-life opponents of abortion. The reason lies in genetic essentialism: the reductionist view of human beings as nothing more than meat puppets dangling from the strands of our DNA. Nowhere is this strange alliance more important, or its philosophical underpinnings more apparent, than in the debate over stem cell research.

At the very earliest stages of development, an embryo is an undifferentiated mass of cells, rather than blood cells, neurons, skin cells, muscle cells, etc. These undifferentiated stem cells can develop into any type of tissue. Isolated stem cells could one day be used to grow new heart, nerve, pancreatic, or liver cells that would replace tissues damaged by disease. Such replacement parts could extend human lifespans by decades, with significantly improved quality. They are just the sort of ambitious, "unnatural" technologies the luddicons fear.

Currently, biotechnologists investigating stem cells use embryos donated by couples who have had infertility treatments. The embryos are grown in laboratory cultures until they reach the blastocyst stage at four to seven days after fertilization. At that point the embryo consists of about 100 or so cells. A blastocyst is a hollow sphere of cells whose outer layer would develop into the placenta while the inner cell mass grew into a fetus. Once the inner cell mass is extracted from the blastocyst, those stem cells can no longer develop into a complete organism.

Stem cells removed from the blastocyst are grown in a culture on a layer of feeder cells that provide the necessary environment to keep them alive and in an undifferentiated state. Researchers are still trying to learn exactly what molecular signals will cause stem cells to develop into specific tissues. Those signals hold the key to using stem cells to develop replacement tissues which would be part of a universal tissue repair kit.

Once those signals are understood, using stem cells will depend, at least in the near future, on technology originally developed in cloning research. As we know from Dolly the lamb, factors in egg cytoplasm can reset an adult cell nucleus, giving it the ability to grow into an embryo as a source for stem cells. Using cloning technology, doctors might one day take the nucleus of one of your skin cells, put it in a human egg from which the nucleus has been removed, and allow that cell to divide to the blastocyst stage. They would then take out the stem cells from its inner cell mass and dope them with the appropriate hormones and proteins to turn the stem cells into, say, heart tissue, which could then be used to repair your ailing heart. Using your own cells in this way would mean that your immune system wouldn't reject the newly engrafted tissues, since the tissues would be a perfect match.

This research obviously promises to significantly advance human health and longevity. And just as obviously, stem cell research is completely entangled with the politics of abortion. It involves the use of embryonic tissues and, eventually, the creation of fertilized eggs that abortion opponents consider full-fledged human beings. To abortion opponents, a blastocyst used to duplicate your heart tissue isn't an extension of your tissue. It's another human being--the equivalent of your identical twin. As Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, told the Los Angeles Times about research on embryonic cells, "It doesn't matter if it's done in the womb or a petri dish, it's still killing."

After Geron scientists announced in November 1998 that they'd isolated human embryonic stem cells from donated embryos and aborted fetuses, President Clinton asked the National Bioethics Advisory Commission to look into any ethical issues associated with stem cells. In January, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services ruled that the National Institutes of Health could fund research using already derived embryonic stem cells. This ruling provoked 70 anti-abortion House members, including Majority Leader Richard Armey (R-Tex.), Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), and Republican Conference Chairman J.C. Watts (R-Okla.) to sign a letter of protest to the president, declaring that the HHS ruling violated the congressional ban on funding research on human embryos. The congressional ban, adopted in 1996, outlaws the use of federal funds for the creation of human embryos for research in which they are "destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death."

In January, however, HHS General Counsel Harriet Rabb artfully concluded that Geron's embryonic stem cells "are not a human embryo within the statutory definition." She based her decision on the fact that the cells "do not have the capacity to develop into a human being, even if transferred to the uterus." Consequently, destroying them in the course of research would not constitute the destruction of an embryo.

NIH scientists, whose work depends on federal funding, are eager for the ban to be lifted. NIH Director Harold Varmus correctly claims that federal funding also brings federal oversight, which he argues will protect the public interest. Of course, Varmus and other researchers curiously overlook the point that it was precisely federal oversight that led to the ban on federal support of this important research in the first place.

As it became clearer that the National Bioethics Advisory Commission was going to recommend that some stem cell research be federally funded, opponents turned up the heat. In July, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) sponsored a Capitol Hill press conference featuring a group of bioethicists, religious activists, and physicians who oppose human embryonic stem cell research. "Human embryos are not mere biological tissues or clusters of cells; they are the tiniest of human beings," asserts the group's July 1 press release.

At the press conference, Edmund Pellegrino, a bioethicist at Georgetown University's Kennedy Bioethics Center, took aim at even private research efforts like those sponsored by Geron. He urged that a congressional ban "should be extended permanently to include privately supported as well as federally supported research involving the production and destruction of living human embryos." Although the current debate centers on federal funding, the real issue is whether the research should be done at all.

According to an NIH spokesperson, the NIH's draft guidelines for embryonic stem cell research are likely to be issued before the end of the year, and Congress will take up the subject in February. Sens. Arlen Spector (R-Pa.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) are the two leading proponents of human stem cell research. Opponents include DeLay, Brownback, and Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.).

The opponents argue that biotechnologists should concentrate on isolating and using stem cells known to exist in adults instead. Such adult stem cells are the precursor cells that renew tissues like skin and the linings of the intestines, and they likely could be used to regenerate these tissues. But many researchers believe that adult stem cells won't be as protean as embryonic cells--that they won't be able to turn into as many different types of cells.