by hilzoy
Robert George and Eric Cohen have a very disingenuous op-ed on stem cells in today’s Washington Post. They start out by describing the Korean stem cell scandal, in which Hwang Woo Suk, a Korean researcher who had claimed to clone human embryos, turned out to have faked his research. George and Cohen note that “some dismiss the South Korean fraud as the work of a few bad scientific apples”. That “some” includes me. I think that the fact that one researcher seems to have engaged in egregious scientific fraud does not carry any wider implications about stem cell research, any more than the forgery of Hitler’s diaries implies that the study of history is inherently corrupt.
Silly me! As George and Cohen explain:
“In the end, the lesson of the cloning scandal is not simply that specific research guidelines were violated; it is that human cloning, even for research, is so morally problematic that its practitioners will always be covering their tracks, especially as they try to meet the false expectations of miraculous progress that they have helped create.”
Really? I can see arguing something like this about, say, Josef Mengele. Someone who routinely killed his subjects, performed unanaesthetized and unnecessary surgery on them, and in one case sewed a pair of twins together in an effort to create Siamese twins, cannot possibly have straightforwardly believed that what he was doing was morally unproblematic. Mengele had to either believe, explicitly, that what he was doing was wrong, or else be hiding the truth from himself. In either case he would have to have completely ignored his conscience. And someone who can completely ignore his conscience in one part of his life would be more likely than other people to ignore it elsewhere. Or so one might argue.
Whether or not this argument works, though, you can’t make it about people who sincerely believe that what they are doing is right, not because they are hiding from the awful truth, but just because they honestly don’t see anything wrong with it. Stem cell researchers generally do believe that what they’re doing is not morally wrong, and they believe this because, according to them, there really is no problem with killing a five-day-old blastocyst. To say that stem cell research is morally corrupting despite this fact would be like saying that gays who are not tormented by guilt because they do not think that being gay is wrong are nonetheless more likely than other people to rob banks. After all, an anti-gay activist might say, I believe that homosexuality is wrong, and people who do one wrong thing are more likely than other people to do another. That’s just silly.
Oddly enough, though they spend about half of their column on the Korean scandal, George and Cohen’s point isn’t really about that scandal, or even about what they call “research cloning” and the scientific community calls “somatic cell nuclear transfer” (SCNT). It’s about three bills that will shortly come up before the Senate:
“Last week the Senate agreed to consider three bioethics bills: one that would permit federal funding for research on embryos left over in fertility clinics, one that would prohibit fetal farming and one that would fund various alternative methods of producing genetically controlled, pluripotent stem cells — just the kind of stem cells we would get from cloning, but without the embryo destruction.”
The supposed relevance of the Korean scandal to these bills is as follows. Researchers have said that SCNT would be helpful to them. This is true, for reasons I explained here (scroll down to ‘The Main Issue’.) George and Cohen draw this conclusion: “If cloning is really so important for research, then overturning the Bush administration policy to fund research on “spare” IVF embryos is not very useful.”
Let’s consider a few analogies to this alleged argument.
(1) “If microscopes are really so important for research, then buying Petri dishes and cell culture medium is not very useful.”
(2) “If having working brakes is so important for a car, then having an engine that actually runs, or a steering wheel that can steer, must not be very useful.”
(3) “If having a cool haircut is so important to teenagers, then they must not care very much about wearing cool clothes.”
Newsflash: it is possible for two things to be important for one purpose at the same time! It’s amazing, I know, but trust me on this one: the fact that I would be very happy if the air conditioning guys called me back does not mean that literally nothing else would “be very useful” to me. Maybe I, and stem cell researchers, are just very demanding people, and that’s why we are capable of finding not just one but several things useful, all at the very same time. Or maybe that’s how human life works, and George and Cohen are just being disingenuous.
***
About “fetal farming”: I’ve been reading scary references to “fetal farming” for several years now, all of them in pro-life publications. Every now and again, I ask some of the stem cell researchers I know whether they have any idea what, exactly, “fetal farming” might be, and they just look bewildered. As far as I can tell, what people who use the term seem to have in mind is this: we create a cloned embryo with some genetic profile that we want. We then implant it in a woman’s uterus, and let it grow for a while, until it has reached the specific stage we need it to get to. Then we abort the fetus and harvest its tissue.
Right.
I have no problem whatsoever with banning the implantation of any cloned embryo, ever. That’s fine by me*. Moreover, it’s also fine with the research community, which has consistently supported a ban on implanting cloned embryos, and on keeping them alive for more than fourteen days. (This is partly because you can’t get embryonic stem cells from an embryo that’s more than five or six days old.) George and Cohen seem to think that this is just a temporary ruse — that once researchers gain the ability to engage in somatic cell nuclear transfer, they will turn their attention to legalizing “fetal farming”. To which I can only say: well, let’s finally enact a ban on implanting cloned embryos, and then we can see whether or not George and Cohen’s dark imaginings actually materialize. While we’re at it, we could also ban harvesting fetuses to make cunning little fetus-skin coats, just to be on the safe side. After all, you never know what those scientists might be up to next.
George and Cohen’s final point is to recommend work on so-called “alternative methods” of deriving embryonic stem cells.
“Instead of engaging in fraud and coverup, or conducting experiments that violate the moral principles of many citizens, we should look to scientific creativity for an answer. Since the cloning fraud, many scientists — such as Markus Grompe at Oregon Health & Science University and Rudolf Jaenisch at MIT — have been doing just that. And others, such as Kevin Eggan at Harvard, may have found a technique, called “cell fusion,” that would create new, versatile, genetically controlled stem cell lines by fusing existing stem cells and ordinary DNA. Scientists in Japan just announced that they may have found a way to do this without even needing an existing stem cell line.
In other words: all the benefits of research cloning without the ethical problems.”
I have nothing against funding research into these methods provided that this is not seen as an alternative to funding embryonic stem cell research. Some of the techniques seem unlikely to work, and some represent no moral advance over SCNT, since they require the destruction of a being that could develop into a human child. (See here (subscription wall, alas) and my slightly out of date explanation here.) Kevin Eggan’s technique requires the use of embryonic stem cells, and moreover yields cells with twice the normal complement of genes, which makes them unusable in therapy. From the NEJM (sorry, subscription):
“There is some risk that people who are seeking to place restrictions on research into the biology of human embryonic stem cells may misinterpret these findings, arguing that the new technique represents an alternative approach to the generation of “chromosomally tailored” human embryonic stem cells that have therapeutic potential. Kevin Eggan, one of the investigators in this study, says he is “very disappointed” by this prospect and emphasizes that the study “does not deliver a methodology that can replace human embryonic stem cells.” Although this finding will inspire further studies to identify and determine the mechanism of action of the critical factors that reprogram chromosomes, the hybrid cells cannot generate embryonic stem cells and, because they are tetraploid, their therapeutic potential is nil.”
Oh well.
The last technique mentioned by George and Cohen was announced (sorry; subscription again) just a week ago, and the experiments behind the announcement have not yet been published. It sounds very interesting, but it’s hard to evaluate without more information. According to scientists who were at the meeting where this result was announced,
“But scientists caution that Yamanaka’s report has not eliminated the need for work on embryonic stem cells. Researchers must test the same four factors in human cells. And it is not entirely clear whether the reprogrammed cells can do everything that embryonic cells can. Although many of the genes they express are the same, many are not.
Yamanaka’s report came just a day after the US Senate said it would vote on relaxing rules on embryonic research later this year. Some have argued that progress in reprogramming has made work on embryonic stem cells unnecessary, and they may seize on Yamanaka’s work to bolster this position. But scientists at the Toronto meeting said that would be a mistake.”
I don’t know Eric Cohen’s work very well, but I normally respect Robert George. I don’t think that this column, with its lack of decent arguments and lurid fantasies, is worthy of him. There are serious debates to be had on this topic, but this column doesn’t contain any of them.
* I’m not entirely sure about the specific bill that has been introduced to ban “fetal farming” — S. 3504 — but that’s because of its language. It makes it a crime to “solicit or knowingly acquire, receive, or accept a donation of human fetal tissue knowing that a human pregnancy was deliberately initiated to provide such tissue.” I think that might rule out not just “fetal farming” but cases like this one, in which a couple whose child had a rare genetic defect that could be cured by cord blood from a sibling, used IVF and screening to ensure that the child they were already trying to have would be a compatible cord blood donor. That case involved cord blood, but one can also imagine cases involving, say, bone marrow or some other tissue. Would it be “fetal tissue” if, say, the child was born prematurely? If what the child needed was, say, placental tissue (after birth)? I don’t know. I do think that this bill could be rewritten fairly easily to focus on the main issue, for instance by substituting ‘terminated’ for ‘initiated’ in the passage just quoted.
This is not a substantive comment, but I can’t help hearing a drawled, “I was out on the back 40 yesterday, Maw. Them fetuses shore is looking like a good crop this year.”
The first NEJM article linked (Politically Correct Human Embryonic Stem Cells, 353 NEJM 2321) depends critically on the assumption that opponents of stem cell research in the United States do not care at all about matters of degree. That is, about either the likelihood of a group of cells capable of producing human life being wilfully prevented from doing so or about the number of such cells, or both. Having not followed stem cell debates that closely (I, unfairly perhaps, tuned out upon coming to believe that there was a very large overlap between stem cell research opponents and members of pro-life groups that I disagree with), is that there position, that stem cell research isn’t something you can be at all compromising about? Presumably so, by analog to their position on abortion, but I don’t know. Also, that article is pretty readable for someone who hasn’t taken biology since high school, there’s only one or two terms I would need to look up.
I think one reason we get such strange commentary on stem cells is that it cuts deeply into a lot of the mushy support for the pro-life movement. Many people, I expect, don’t think all that much about IVF and to the extent that they do they’re troubled by the idea of embryos floating in an ice tank someplace, but not so troubled as to advocate for laws regulating the practice of IVF to prevent the creation of multiple embryos. The battle is, instead, fought over things like late-term abortions and judicial nominations.
But many people know someone with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s or another disease that could potentially be helped by stem cell research. And many pro-life people have been very upset with Nancy Reagan’s vocal support for the research. For if we as a society allow stem cell research, then Roe v. Wade was correctly decided.
It’s easy to be pro-life if you don’t have to bear any personal consequences of that viewpoint. But reading in the newspaper that your absolutism on abortion could be interfering with the development of cures for your family has to be causing a lot of cognitive dissonance.
Francis: It’s easy to be pro-life if you don’t have to bear any personal consequences of that viewpoint.
And no American “pro-lifer” ever has to bear any personal consequences of that viewpoint, even the women, unless she wants to. Which explains a lot, frankly.
Forgive the ignorance, but isn’t there adult stem cell research going on, too?
Slarti, according to wiki (which information matches up with my state of unexpert interest, fwiw):
(“Pluripotent” is a lovely word, isn’t it?) Or, in short terms, embryonic stem cell research hasn’t been going long but is already considered to have much more potential because embryonic stem cells can do so much more than stem cells cultured from adults.
We’re talking blastocysts, not even zygotes…
Yes, I know what we’re talking about. I didn’t voice any objection to it, either. I’m simply pointing out that there exists stem cell research for which blastocyst does not apply. For the record, if experimenting with blastocysts eventually results in, for example, increased motor function for my daughter, I think I can support that.
And yes, pluripotent is nice, but I can’t find it defined anywhere that’s not contextual. Maybe if I’d taken latin…
Slarti: you’re right; I was talking about embryonic stem cell researchers.
One important point (not prompted by what you said, but by the extent to which other people screw it up — so that I take every opportunity to make it):
Adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells are very, very different. Sometimes you hear people (again, not Slarti) talk as though they were the same thing, except that one comes from an unproblematic source and the other doesn’t. This is wrong; the same sort of mistake as supposing that “rowing machines” and “adding machines” are the same, so if you can’t afford a rowing machine, an adding machine will get the job done pretty much as well for less money. “Machines” are not all alike. Neither are “stem cells”.
Well, I just don’t know enough about the topic to tell either way, but I’d assume that if adult stem cells were exactly the same and available in the same varieties as the emryonic kind, there wouldn’t be much of a fight.
Then again, I could be wrong about that.
Slarti: For the record, if experimenting with blastocysts eventually results in, for example, increased motor function for my daughter, I think I can support that.
But – for the record – supposing that your daughter will never be helped by embryonic stem cell research, but other people will be?
AFAIK, no one I know personally will ever be helped by experiments done on cell cultures taken from blastocysts. I’m still in favor, though, partly because I think that a woman has as much right to donate a blastocyst to scientific research as she does to flush it down the john (and odds are, far more are flushed than used…) and partly because I think scientific research is in principle a good thing, even if it doesn’t benefit me or any one I know directly.
Yes, certainly. It was just one example. It’d be pretty…um…morally flexible of me otherwise, no?
And, for all I know, neither will anyone I know. It’s still early in the research cycle; it may be decades before this sort of thing pans out, and it might not pan out at all in some areas. If we knew the answers, we wouldn’t be asking the questions.
Yes, certainly. It was just one example. It’d be pretty…um…morally flexible of me otherwise, no?
Well, yeah. That’s why I asked. It seems to me it takes no moral backbone at all to be for scientific research that will directly benefit you or someone you love: so I was startled to see you offer this as your reason for supporting stem cell research. That’s the kind of moral flexibility I expect from Nancy Reagan, not from you.
Thanks, I think.
But again, it was only an example. There are quite a lot of other people out there with problems that stem cell research could ultimately aid in. It is, to be honest, much easier for me to get enthusiastic about stem cell research when there’s something at stake for me personally, even if it’s a stretch. Going the other way, I never actually had an issue with it.
If it was all about killing actual babies to forward science, that’d be different. But blastocysts? No problem, here.
Slarti: It is, to be honest, much easier for me to get enthusiastic about stem cell research when there’s something at stake for me personally, even if it’s a stretch. Going the other way, I never actually had an issue with it.
Oh, fair enough. Sorry I snarked.
Never even got to taking offense, J. Just wanted to be clear, is all.
Slightly OT bleg:
Hilzoy, have you ever heard of these?
Are genetically engineered housepets even legal in the ‘States?
I’ve got a couple of chairdogs, myself.
Otherwise, no.
HA! Thanks, Slarti.
That’s the last time I pass along a bleg on behalf of an idiotic coworker.
Check out the guy’s website; he’s practically begging people not to take it seriously.
Apparently the person behind the project is originally from my hometown, London ON CA. I think I might know people who went to high school with him…
Bioengineered pets would, I think, be legal, if they existed. Certainly people are working on pet cloning, and bioengineered animals (e.g., mice for research) are legal.
“Are genetically engineered housepets even legal in the ‘States?”
Yes. This is not a new subject. Setting aside that people have been writing about them in science fiction for many decades, people have been selling them for a bunch of years now. Just as, of course, all sorts of genetic engineering has now been going on for a couple of decades.
Here is a post I wrote last year with a link to an article about future pets, including Genetics Savings & Clone and other ventures. I’ve done other posts, but mostly not, since it’s a fairly old subject. Here is another.
Then there’s Pet TV. And DogCat Radio. Or maybe your pet needs a cell phone.
“Are genetically engineered housepets even legal in the ‘States?”
“Otherwise, no.”
Otherwise, yes. Genpets is a hoax, but the real companies are real and legal. Why would you say “no”? What law do you have in mind?
“…people have been selling them for a bunch of years now”
To be clearer, people have been selling genetically engineered animals for years, and also cloned pets.
Of course, pure-bred dogs are genetically engineered, too.
People tend to think of directly manipulating the genes as the only form of engineering, but that’s a little silly; breeding works as well as it did for Mendel.
“Of course, pure-bred dogs are genetically engineered, too.
People tend to think of directly manipulating the genes as the only form of engineering, but that’s a little silly; breeding works as well as it did for Mendel.”
This is one of my silly (ahem) pet peeves about the no GM food people. They are happy to eat corn that has been genetically engineered for size and blight resistance for generations of farmer controlled selection, but they freak out over the much more controllable (in the sense of which genes get mixed in) direct genetic engineering.
Sebastian: They are happy to eat corn that has been genetically engineered for size and blight resistance for generations of farmer controlled selection, but they freak out over the much more controllable (in the sense of which genes get mixed in) direct genetic engineering.
Indeed. I’m happy to eat corn that has been genetically engineered for centuries and the genes for which are public domain. I’m a lot less happy about brand-new methods of interfering with edible crops, and really extremely unhappy about corporations thinking they can then claim they “own” a food crop as a result of making some tiny changes to the genome – some of which were made in order to make seeds useless without the pesticide which can only be bought from the corporation: some of which were made to make it impossible for farmers to save seed corn for next year’s crop. In the whole human tradition of genetic engineering food crops, the engineer “owns” the first generation of seeds only: after that, it’s the next engineer’s turn. If corporations aren’t willing to abide by that human tradition of common ownership, they should never have got into the genetic engineering business.
“No”, that I had not heard of these as legitimate pets. I thought it was obvious, but I frequently get that wrong.
All that aside, I’m eagerly awaiting the latest in genetically engineered corn dogs.
Slarti, I think you have to go to LA for those
“If having a cool haircut is so important to teenagers, then they must not care very much about wearing cool clothes.”
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