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.