The Too-Weak Rule

A new line has been drawn in the debate over when life begins. The line is called gastrulation. It takes place about two weeks after conception, when the embryonic mass begins to organize itself into layers, forming the first outline of an organism—or, in the case of twins, two organisms. Advocates of human cloning are drawing this line in order to avoid the abortion debate. Prior to gastrulation, they argue, the developing cluster of human cells can't be a person, since it hasn't clarified whether it will become one organism or two. The argument is clever and attractive. But it's being dissolved by the very technology it's supposed to promote.

Last weekend, Michael West, the CEO of Advanced Cell Technology, announced that his company had created the first cloned human embryo. The purpose, West explained, was to develop cures for diseases. On Meet the Press, West argued that since ACT plans to destroy its cloned embryos before gastrulation, "Scientifically, the entities we're creating are not an individual." On Late Edition, he elaborated:

We're talking about making human cellular life, not a human life. A human life, we know scientifically, begins upwards, even into two weeks of human development, where this little ball of cells decides, "I'm going to become one person," or "I am going to be two persons." It hasn't yet decided. No cells of the body of any kind exist in this little ball of cells. And that's as far as we believe it's appropriate to go in applying cloning to medicine.

West is trying to solve what he calls the "slippery slope" problem. He wants to erase the moral line pro-lifers have drawn at conception. On the other hand, he wants to assure us that the line can be redrawn nearby. "Almost all views holding that human life begins at conception maintain that this is the moment when a new and unique human individual comes into being," West and his ACT colleagues wrote a year ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association. This isn't true, they argued. "Developmental individuality, which is central to personhood, is not attained until the primitive body axis has begun to form" during gastrulation. Therefore, society can permit destructive research on pre-gastrulation embryos without sliding toward destructive research on more advanced embryos. "The line established by gastrulation and the appearance of the primitive streak is a clear one," West and his collaborators asserted. "It is unlikely that researchers working in properly monitored environments will blur these distinctions."

Too late. The distinctions are already blurred. West agrees with pro-lifers that personhood prior to birth is defined by two things: totipotentiality—the ability to become a whole organism—and the resolution of individuality. He merely disagrees about the moment at which that combination occurs. But in the age of cloning, both standards lose their significance. Every cell is totipotent, and individuality is never resolved.

West succeeds in the destructive half of his philosophical mission, erasing the line at conception. In cloning—somatic cell nuclear transfer—the nucleus of an egg cell is removed and replaced by a nucleus taken from a body cell. The product of this union, when incubated, begins to grow into an organism genetically identical (with the trivial exception of non-nuclear DNA) to the organism from which its nucleus was taken. It lacks the genetic uniqueness by which pro-lifers have traditionally defined personhood.

So pro-lifers turn to the second criterion: totipotentiality. The newly formed entity is a person, they argue, because it has all the ingredients necessary to form a human being. Implant it in a womb, and it will become a baby. But with cloning, this is true of any cell. Put its nucleus in an enucleated egg, implant it, and it will become a baby. Soon, the egg's hosting services may be unnecessary. According to U.S. News & World Report, ACT has filed for a patent on the reverse technique, in which the egg's proteins are injected into the body cell. "Research advances are making all cells 'embryonic,' "ACT Vice President Robert Lanza explained to U.S. News. Consequently, totipotentiality is no longer a meaningful standard of personhood. "To commit ourselves morally to protecting every living cell in the body would be insane," Ronald Green, ACT's chief ethicist, told the magazine.

The reason this breakthrough won't lead to moral chaos, according to West, Lanza, and Green, is that gastrulation establishes a new threshold of individuality. You can kill an embryo at one week, because you don't know how many people it will become. But you can't kill it at three weeks, since at that point the question has been resolved.

Except it hasn't. That's the unintended lesson of ACT's experiment. The donor of the cloned nucleus, a 40-year-old doctor named Judson Somerville, says an Episcopal bishop assured him that the project wouldn't constitute the creation and killing of life, because the clone was simply an extension of himself. "These are my cells being multiplied in a lab, not those of some other human being," Somerville told U.S. News. So, the question that emerged as the clone began to grow wasn't whether it would become one person or two. The question was whether it would become the second Judson Somerville or the second and third. Forty years after the original Somerville "cells" crossed the gastrulation line, we still don't know how many people they'll become. As long as you're shedding cells, the same is true of you. The era of conclusive individuality is over.

The erasure of the moral significance of the gastrulation line doesn't end the debate over cloning. But it does collapse the wall that West and his colleagues tried to erect between the cloning debate and the abortion debate. To justify their research, they'll have to fall back on arguments about the early embryo's incapacity for thoughts, feelings, or experiences. Meanwhile, pro-lifers will have to explain why a newly conceived embryo is precious if neither its genome nor its totipotentiality is unique. All of us will have to figure out how old values, by absorbing new realities, can re-establish moral boundaries along the continuum of life. It's not the end of the world. It's not the beginning, either.

Now that is the cleverest and best-written essay on ethics I've seen in a long, long time. It poses questions that simply cannot be answered if you let the reproductive and cell biology specialists frame the gestalt within which the problem is answered.

However, it is quite easily solved, and I admit that here I appeal to authority, an argument that cannot be countered with reason. My church teaches that the Lord forbids "murder, or anything like unto murder."

Now the creation of a clone isn't murder--it's the creation of an identical twin, and I personally see nothing unethical in the process so long as A) there is adequate reason to believe that the clone will be at least as healthy and as normal as any member of its species, B) there is no risk of exposing humanity to a dread new disease as a result of the cloning, and C) there exists a reasonably valid purpose for creating the clone. (That one would be a very difficult standard to meet, in my opinion, with humans at least. With corn and cows, see argument B--satisfy that one, and you have my blessing.)

Once one has created that (human) clone, one has made a human life. You have the obligation to see to it that it is permitted to have a normal uterus in which to develop, a normal delivery, and a normal family in which to grow, develop, and be human. We cannot take even an abandoned, unwanted living baby--even a highly defective one--and make it into a laboratory animal (much as that would advance science) and therefore while a cloned child could be studied it could only be studied as any other child can be studied.

It seems to me that the individuality argument is quite spurious. That gastrula may certainly form into more than one individual. If healthy and normal, however, it cannot form into FEWER than one individual. Therefore, you may be said to be committing, potentially (and highly hypothetically)an infinite number of acts of murder if you destroy or abort the further development and specialization of a baby at the gastrula stage. The number murdered is certainly not zero. Perhaps God includes the lost posterity of the dead in the count when a life is taken unrighteously; I wouldn't want to go there, myself.

Moving proteins, cell nuclei, DNA, mitochondria, and other cell organelles and components from cell to cell is within our grasp now. What is not within our grasp is the creation from scratch of a living cell, however simple. We cannot make yeast, we cannot make algae, from the various bottles and jars of chemicals that sit, sterile and lifeless, on the shelves of the most elaborate chemistry lab. No one can do that. I believe we never shall. The elements of this earth were put together by God in millions of ways that are not living, and we do the same miracle with His laws, but only He has put the distinctive sparks into sterile matter that makes it grow, multiply, eat, sleep, puke, sniff fire hydrants, fight, laugh, cry, and write symphonies.

No matter how arrogant we get, and no matter how we play with the words that define what is and what is not a human being, and no matter how clever we think we are when we move the stuff of life from cell to cell as if we were making life itself, we cannot pretend to override the Creator's pretty simple code of conduct. Thou shalt not kill.

The fetal cell lines being used in research cannot be turned back into the developing babies who were lost. Those babies are dead, lost, gone; they are no more. The scientists who made the fetal cell lines are probably beyond any Earthly justice, even if they had broken any flawed Earthly laws, which I doubt. They are growing skin cultures in the lab, often from the discarded praeputia, for the treatment of burn victims. No one died in the creation of those skin cultures, and a great deal of suffering is relieved by that technology. Waste not, want not. But when a gastrula is involved, you're talking about >/=1 human being, and nothing less. Killing that human being is murder, by the terms of the most basic covenants we've been given.

A Down Syndrome baby is genetically significantly different from you or I; it looks different, develops differently, and isn't always capable of any of the behaviors we generally regard as distinctive to humans. Its DNA codes for different proteins, which result in an abnormal but still usually viable human being. Males with Down Syndrome cannot reproduce; females sometimes can. Yet some individuals, with genetic defects every bit as marked as those of more afflicted individuals, are capable of being educated through college, marrying, parenting, and contributing to society. Likewise, President Ronald Reagan no longer enjoys the benefits of a human cerebral cortex; neurologically, I suppose he is functioning far below a normal human standard. There is little or no hope that The Gipper will make a great speech again; is he kept alive and cared only for the sake of the great things he's done? No. He's cared for because he is human, and cared for well because he is loved; comatose, he would still be human and loved.

We must concede that many humans have DNA that is statistically speaking not fully human DNA; some genetic disorders that can result in a live birth are related to mutations as different from mainstream human DNA as the chimpanzee's. Yet no one can argue that the Down Syndrome child is a member of any other species than homo sapiens. I suppose on DU you could find opinions on President Ronald Reagan's species, but these are not credible, of course.

If a cell in the laboratory, say one taken from a freshwater shrimp, were to have all of its genetic information taken out and the complete genetic information from a human being inserted, the result would not be a human being or a human cell. The cell might reproduce, and might well produce enzymes and other desired proteins, but it could never be turned into shrimp or human. I understand that most insulin is made from bacteria which have been altered through recombinant technology. A certain section of genetic material in the bacterial cell is replaced with a cloned section of genetic material that codes for insulin. The cell then goes on happily filling itself up with this unneeded protein, which it conveniently segregates in little pockets within the cell. All we must do then is lyse the martyred bacteria and harvest the insulin. The technology of cloning and recombining DNA is not magic and it's not right or wrong in and of itself. Each use of the technology must be examined on a case by case basis. We do the same sort of ethical analysis, on an informal basis, before we use our firearms or drive our cars, really. Biotechnology is a tool. It can be used for good or evil, just as all tools can be.

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