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Ethical implications of stem cell research--Part II

"Give us your children," medical scientists ask

What does it mean to be human?
How important is the individual?

The fate of stem cell research and
abortion hangs on the answers

By James Horsley
Published: November 19, 2009

Editor's note: There are five chapters to Part II of this series of about 10 pages each.

1.

We, as a nation, are at war over what it means to be a human. The outcome of this battle will determine the fate of abortion and stem cell research.

Several recent governmental actions and legislative efforts have the potential for significantly altering the course of this struggle. One is an executive order by President Barack Obama, expanding federal funding of research on stem cell lines, and the others are bills at both the state and federal level that in general would legally define a person as a member of the species homo sapiens and that life begins at conception.

In the East Room of the White House on March 9, 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama signs an executive order and presidential memorandum clearing the way for federal funding of stem cell research.

At stake in this war on meaning is whether the unborn are to be considered persons, with the rights of a citizen. At issue is whether morality determines what is permissible in science, or whether science itself determines morality. The outcome will establish if the United States will continue to discriminate against its members, making two classes, the born and the unborn.

We run the risk, due to misinformation or the lack of it, of buying into embryonic stem cell research as having the potential of providing near future cures for injury and disease, when, in fact, no therapies have as yet been derived from embryonic stem cells and no animal models have show that the very basic step to such therapies, namely, differentiation, can be achieved in the laboratory.

A holding pipette at left positions an egg, while another pipette pierces its skin, extracting the stem cells inside.

Differentiation is a process whereby all-purpose stem cells are transformed into more specific cells, such as heart or muscle cells. This happens spontaneously in the environment of an embryo--that is how life unfolds and develops--but it has not been duplicated outside the embryo in the laboratory. Stem cells are the cell mass inside of an embryo. Stem cell lines have been created by scooping out the mass of stem cells from a live embryo, putting these cells in a small glass plate called a Petri dish, and allowing them to multiply. Without the aid of the full embryo, these cells replicate endlessly, without differentiation. Scientists are trying to find the key, such as chemicals and other interventions, that will direct differentiation. Their pursuit verges on learning how to create life itself.

Sophisticated medical instruments are required to enter and manage this world. Microscopic pipettes (small tubes) are used to hold on to an embryo to position it so that another pipette, even smaller, can pierce its skin and suck out the stem cells inside. The contents are discharged into the Petri dish. As the stem cell populations increase, colonies are sectioned and transferred from Petri dish to Petri dish using a number of methods, including "specialized stem cell knifes, razors or pipettes." (Hohestein et al., 2009)

The stem cell industry, which includes institutions of higher learning and corporations, would have us believe that it is acceptable to compromise one's moral values because vast horizons of cures may be obtained through their research. This is situational ethics, which places the life of the individual at the feet of society. Moreover, medical ethics dictates that before humans are experimented on, animal trials should be first conducted that demonstrate not only the potential benefit of such research, but that, indeed, such envisioned results are possible. So far, embryonic stem cells outside the environment of the embryo can not be made to differentiate to the point of being useful for therapy because the differentiation can not be controlled.

As reported in the American Journal of Heart and Circulatory Physology,"we currently do not appear to know enough to push cellular differentiation down the pathways we chose" (Jovin and Girdano, 2008).

We are being asked to give up our children, the unborn, to satisfy the needs of a coalition of researchers whose goal involves the destrution of human embryonic life and whose science has all the ear-marks of a pseudo-science.

Defining away the meaning of human life
Part of the methodology that the stem cell industry uses to get its way is by a process of smoke and mirrors, whereby proponents of such research define away the meaning of human life.

So, what is human, that is, what does it mean to be a human being, to have human life? On one side of the debate is the view that the embryo’s status as a human person is from the moment of conception. Others hold that this status is not granted until after birth.

Oddly enough, scientists, the very group that is fighting the hardest to disregard the human status of the embryo, largely agree that human life begins at conception. Attorney and Bioethicist Clark D. Forsythe, senior counsel, Americans United for Life, gives a brief overview in "What embryology and science textbooks say about the beginning of human beings."

As Pauerstein states in his 1987 text on Obstetrics, "[e]ach member of a species begins with fertilization--the successful merging of two different pools of genetic information to form a new individual."

Levine & Suzuki concur in their 1993 text, The Secret of Life: "For better or for worse, every individual's genetic endowment is determined at the moment of conception. Sperm and egg each carry a random selection of parental genes. Their fusion creates a genetically unique individual."

...the 1995 Ramsey Colloquium on Embryo Research concluded: "The embryo is a being: that is to say, it is an integral whole with actual existence. The being is human. It will not articulate itself into some other kind of animal. If is is objected that, at five or fifteen days, the embryo does not look like a human being, it must be pointed out that this is precisely what a human being looks like--and what each of us looked like--at five or fifteen days of development (Forsythe, 2009)."

Leading embryologists also believe that the human genome, that is, the entirety of an organism's hereditary information encoded in DNA, begins at conception, including those working in the field of stem cell research.

Renee Reijo Pera, an embryologist and director of the Center for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Education at Stanford University, looks at it this way: "We’re uniquely human from the moment that egg and sperm fuse. A 'human program' begins before the brain even begins to form (A Review of the “What does it mean to be human?” panel at the 2008 World Science Festival, 2008).

In fact, the embryo during its first few days is not merely a featureless orb of cells, as previously thought. Instead, the plan for the human body is laid out moments after conception, according to a study by Richard Gardner, an embryologist as the University of Oxford, UK, as reported in the journal Nature. (Study shows plan for human body is laid out moments after conception, 2002).

But the path of meaning gets more obscure when it comes to when a human becomes a person entitled to full human rights, including the right not to be harmed.

Taking the life of a person is universally condemned. Exodus 20:13 states that: “You shall not murder [slay with premeditation]”

According to federal statute (US Code: Title 18, Section 1111):

Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. Every murder perpetrated by poison, lying in wait, or any other kind of willful, deliberate, malicious, and premeditated killing; or committed in the perpetration of, or attempt to perpetrate, any arson, escape, murder, kidnapping, treason, espionage, sabotage, aggravated sexual abuse or sexual abuse, child abuse, burglary, or robbery; or perpetrated as part of a pattern or practice of assault or torture against a child or children; or perpetrated from a premeditated design unlawfully and maliciously to effect the death of any human being other than him who is killed, is murder in the first degree.

Experimenting on embryonic life would appear to violate the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who reasoned that conduct is "right" if it treats others as ends in themselves and not as means to an end. Taking a life of a human, homicide, is using another for one's own ends.

Is a scientist, who kills embryonic life with premeditation in the perpetration of doing medical experiments, a murderer in the first degree? Yes, if what is killed is human. But murder is not murder if what one kills is not human, that is, is not a human being, a person.

Two positions
So, we have two positions.

On one side is the view that the embryo has human status as a person and is a human being. This concept can be traced back to the Biblical view. According to Jeremiah 5:1, an individual is created to be who one is even before conception:

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee...(Kind James Bible)

And in Psalm 139:

15. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, 16. your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be (NIV).

President Bush, as reported in Part I of this series, stated his opposition to destroying embryos for research purposes. While signing his first veto rejecting legislation that would ease limits on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, he was surrounded by 18 families who had "adopted" frozen embryos--embryos that were "extras" at fertility treatment centers, unused by the couples that donated them. Instead of being discarded or used in research, they had been implanted in the wombs of other mothers so the couples could have children.

"Each of these children was still adopted while still an embryo and has been blessed with a chance to grow, to grow up in a loving family," President Bush said. "These boys and girls are not spare parts (Roberts, 2006)."

According to these perspectives, an embryo would be the first step in the physical development of a human being. Instead of being spare parts or tissue to be harvest for medical experimentation and potential cures, they are human deserving the right to live and have that life protected.

On the other hand
On the other side are a wide range of views that progressively diminish the rights of the embryo, also called the blastocyst, including its status in the laboratory. One view holds that:

...the blastocyst outside the mother’s body possesses no innate quality of human dignity. It does not stand up on its own and demand we treat it with moral protectability.

This view, reported in The Stem Cell Debate, 2007, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, is held by Ted Peters, co-editor of Theology and Science published by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley. He also served on the Science and Medical Accountability Standards Working Group for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which was formed following voter approval of a proposition granting $3 billion for stem cell research in California. Peters reasons that:

Those who do stand up and provide us with an opportunity to love and to impart dignity are suffering people, whose lives could come to fuller flower with regenerative therapy.

Douglas Melton, co-director of Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI), as mentioned in Part I, observed that:

...all human cells, even individual sperm and eggs, are 'living.' The relevant question is 'when does personhood begin?' That's a valid theological or philosophical question, but from the scientific perspective, this work holds enormous potential to save lives, cure diseases, and improve the health of millions of people. The reality of the suffering of those individuals far outweighs the potential of blastocysts that would never be implanted and allowed to come to term even if we did not do this research.

Melton states that a relevant question is when does "personhood" begin. But he also holds that stem cell research is important because it has the potential to "safe lives, cure diseases, improve the health of millions of people." He implies that regardless of whether the embryo is human or not, if destroying embryos has the potential of saving lives, then "from the scientific perspective," it is a valid pursuit of science.

That is, the potential of a blastocyst, an embryo, to become a human being is outweighed by the potential of that embryo to save lives. This is an odd balance, for the "potential" of an embryo depends on it being allowed to be implanted in a mother's womb and come to term. It is something that has been demonstrated again and again to happen, namely, pregnancy and birth. On the other hand, the potential of a embryo's stem cells to save lives has never been demonstrated.

Resolving these profound ethical dilemmas involve answering two central questions. At what point:

1. does an embryo become a human person and
2. is it ethically permissible to take the life of this embryo to potentially cure disease?

And these questions all revolve around defining who or what is human with the right to be protected from harm, that is, just what is a human person, one that has "personhood," a human being? We must look more deeply.

A child or an adult is obviously human, but as discussed, in the minds of many it becomes more problematic to determine if a human person includes the embryo or the fetus.

What dictionaries say
What do dictionaries have to say about what is human? The general dictionary is of little help. Dictionary definitions usually state that a human is a person or that a person is a human being. This essentially is a tautology, that is, repeating the same idea in different words.

Some medical dictionaries are not much better. One on-line medical dictionary defines "human" as: "Belonging to man or mankind; having the qualities or attributes of a man; of or pertaining to man or to the race of man; as, a human voice; human shape; human nature; human sacrifices. 'To err is human; to forgive, divine.' (Pope)"

However, Mosby's Medical Dictionary is more definite. A human is defined as "a member of the genus Homo and particularly of the species H. sapiens.

This then leads to asking what is a genus and a species. A genus comes from the Latin, meaning "kind." It is a subdivision of a family of organisms. A genus usually is composed of several closely related species. The genus Homo has only one species, Homo sapiens (humans).

Given this, would a human embryo be a human? To answer this, we must ask what kind of organism it is, that is, if the human embryo is a member of the genus Homo and the species Homo sapiens. To do this, let us examine a product of an abortion of a human mother, either an embryo or fetus.

If we were to ask of what species this dead organism is a member, would one say it was the member of the species "bald eagle" or "golden trout"? Or course not. It would be identified as a member of the species Homo sapiens. It would be termed a dead human embryo. If the embryo under examination is a dead human embryo, then at one point is was a live human embryo, that is, the embryo or fetus was human.

However, bioethesitists such a Peter Singer reason that since a somatic cell, such as a skin cell, can produce a clone, an embryo is really nothing more than potential human life, "for we would find that 'potential human life' was all around us, in every cell of our bodies (Singer, 2005)."

Peter Singer

Patrick Lee

However, leading experts in the field of bioethics and law disagree. An embryo is not a potential human life, but an actual human being, contend professors Patrick Lee and Robert P. George. Lee is a professor of bioethics and director of the Institute of Bioethics, Franciscan University of Steubenville, Steubenville, Ohio. George is a McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University--where he lectures on constitutional interpretation, civil liberties and philosophy of law. They made the following observations:

We contend that as a matter of basic biological fact human embryos are actual human beings in the earliest stages of their natural development. Human embryos (or fetuses, or infants) do not differ in kind from mature human beings (as carrots or alligators differ from humans); rather the difference between human embryos (fetuses, infants) and adults is a difference merely in stage or degree of development of precisely the same kind of being.

That is, there is no difference in kind between a human embryo and an adult human. The difference is merely development, a factor of time, not of type. Lee and George explain:

Unlike gametes (the sperm and eggs whose union might produce a new human being), and unlike somatic cells that might be used in cloning, human embryos have within themselves not only all the organizational information needed but also the active disposition to use that information to develop themselves to the stage of a mature human being. If provided a suitable environment and nutrition, and barring accident, disease, or intentional violence done to them, these nascent human beings will grow by an integrated, self-directed process, through the fetal, infant, toddler, child, and adolescent stages of human maturation, and into adulthood, with their identity and distinctness intact. Thus, each one is now the same human individual, the same substantial entity, that may later crawl, then walk, then talk, then reason, make choices, and perform the actions characteristic of mature human beings.

They conclude:

It is wrong to kill an adult, not because he or she has achieved a certain degree of development, but because of what (i.e., the kind of entity) he or she is, namely, a human being... So, the human being possesses dignity and a right to life from the time he or she comes to be; and he or she comes to be either at fertilization, in the case of sexual reproduction, or with the successful completion of the process of somatic cell nuclear transfer, in the case of cloning (Lee and George, 2006).

So, a human embryo is human. But advocated of research on human embryos further counter that an embryo is not really a person, that is, a subject with certain rights and entitled to be protected from harm. We must look further.

A number of strategies are being used by medical researchers in the field of regenerative medicine to avoid the obvious conclusions stemming from the position that a human embryo is human. Scientist begin to split hairs or just assume their position is right.

Besides defining what human means via dictionaries, we have several other choices: defining what one means by assumption, or arriving at a definition by means of the legislature or the courts.

2.

"Frankly, federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research can bring on embryo harvesting, perhaps even human cloning that occurs," Cantor said. "We don't want that. That shouldn't be done. That's wrong."

Definition by assumption
In arriving at policies or decision involving what is to be considered human or a person with human rights, definitions by assuming what is meant are the most common—and of the least help, for there is nothing binding in such definitions. Assumption is a matter of opinion.

In his quest to liberalize research involving stem cells, President Obama appears to employ a definition of what is human or what is a person by assumption. His executive order on stem cells and his statements concerning that order imply that embryonic stem cell research does not involve destroying a human life worthy of protection. Following is a brief overview of his thinking and how he justified his position.

Saying that President George Bush’s restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research involved “a false choice between sound science and moral values,” as mentioned, Obama signed an executive order allowing the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, that is, biomedical experiments involving stem cells culled from human embryos.

“It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda--and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology,” Obama said as he signed the order.

Facts and ideology
So, what are the facts and what is ideology?

If in fact a human embryo is human, then destroying it by stem cell research would be taking a human life, and that would be wrong.

Ideology is defined as “the body of doctrine or thought that guides an individual, social movement, institution or group.” If an individual or group is concerned about guiding actions according to what is right or wrong—that is, what is moral—that is an ideology.

It would appear that Obama is saying, in effect, that scientific or governmental decisions should not be made for reasons that could include moral reasons. But this, of course, would be absurd. So, what is going on?

In his executive order, he said that choosing between science and morality was a “false choice," and that in this case their goals were “not inconsistent.” He said:

As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering. I believe we have been given the capacity and will to pursue this research--and the humanity and conscience to do so responsibly.

But, is research that destroys human life responsible? If destroying an embryo destroys a life, then it would make no sense to talk about embryonic stem cell research as easing human suffering, unless, of course,

1. you believe that some humans must suffer so that an elect group may not or

2. that the embryo is not to be regarded as life that is human with human rights.

New stem cell lines allowed
With regard to Obama's executive order, most likely both perspectives pertain. Let us look more closely at the order's ramifications.

In sum, it allows federally funded researchers to use hundreds of new sources of already existing embryonic stem cell lines for research in hopes of creating better treatments, possibly even cures, for conditions ranging from diabetes to paralysis.

That seems like a laudable goal, but on reflection, it logically involves the possibility of establish two classes of human beings, those who deserve to be cured and those who may be sacrificed for the sake of medical science.

In other words, under such a view, one has the right to hold a prejudice against embryonic life as not worthy of being allowed to live because it is, in the minds of those that hold that view, inferior to life after birth.

In Obama’s scenario, embryos not only must sit at the back of the bus of life, and give up their seat to more privileged persons--the born--but at the driver’s discretion, may not even be allowed to board at all.

Until now, researchers had to limit themselves to just 21 stem cell lines created before August 2001, when President George W. Bush limited funding because of “fundamental questions about the beginnings of life and the ends of science.” Mr. Obama’s order frees the National Institutes of Health to fund any stem cell research it deems appropriate. NIH will write guidelines for funding, according to the Washington Post, March 10, 2009.

A foot in the door
However, Obama’s executive order does not open the door all the way for embryonic stem cells research. Federal funds can not be used to make new human embryonic stem cell lines, according to LeRoy Walters, a senior research scholar at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2009.

Under the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, it is illegal to use federal money on research that involves the creation or destruction of human embryos. Congress would have to change that law to permit NIH funding for the creation of new cell lines.

The Dickey-Wicker Amendment defines a human embryo as “any organism, not protected as a human subject...that is derived by fertilization, parthenogenesis, cloning, or any other means from one or more human gametes or human diploid cells.”

While Obama does not explicitly say what me means when he says that choosing between science and morality involves a "false choice" regarding stem cell research, possibly what he has in the back of his mind is this: technically speaking since stem cells, in already existing stem cell lines, can not become human beings in the laboratory, nothing is immoral regarding experiments on them. Never mind the fact that embryos were initially destroyed to obtains these lines in the first place. And never mind that such research opens the door to embryonic creation and destruction.

And how does his executive order open the door? Three ways:

1. by providing increased funding,

2. by providing legitimacy to the field of stem cell research and

3. by taking us another step closer.

Increased funding
The order is expected to generate more than the $42 million the agency now spends each year on human embryonic stem cell research. Dr. Lawrence Tabak, NIH acting edeputy director said:

We have no preconceived notions. The NIH will get $10.4 billion in additional funding as part of the stimulus package, and some of that will probably be spent on new human embryonic stem cell studies (Kaplan, 2009).

Even worse, his endorsement gives the stamp of governmental approval, which could stimulate increased private experimentation into embryonic stem cell research and increased private investment into this field. While the Dickey-Wicker Amendment prohibits federal funding of embryonic creation and destruction, in the United States there is no federal legislation prohibiting cloning for either reproductive or therapeutic purposes, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Genetics and Public Policy Center (Cloning: Dickey-Wicker Amendment, 2009). There are only state prohibitions regarding embryos. See National Conference of State Legislatures' charts onstem cell research laws and human cloning laws.

Legitimacy
"It is really a new era for stem cell biology," says Dr. Pera, director of the Center for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Education at Stanford University. "[It] has immediately changed the landscape and mentality … and there is a sense that this is legitimate science."

In a Forbes.com article "What the stem cell ban reversal means for you," it noted that as yet, scientists have not been able to achieve therapies by the implantation of cells or tissues derived from embryonic stem cells. But funding nevertheless has been granted to research that has achieved no healing, but only a promise. As Dr. Pera noted, "Where else do they give someone who is green as can be $1 million and say, 'See what you can do'? (Ruiz, 2009)"

When Obama announced the lifting of the ban on the funding of stem cell rearch, all across Cambridge and Boston researchers gathered to hear his words in laboratories that together are known as the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI).

Some Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers and staff from HSCI co-director Doug Melton's lab gather in their lunchroom to watch and celebrate as President Obama signs an executive order that overturned President Bush’s ban on stem cell funding. Melton is at right.

After he spoke, David Scadden, co-director of HSCI said:

"What a tremendous relief! Science in this extremely promising area can now enter the playing field of ideas, opportunities, and competition for funding without the overlay of political constraint. It is the beginning of a new era for stem cell science and I hope the end of discovery being shackled back for political purposes."

Scadden’s co-director, Doug Melton, who watched the Obama speech in a lab lunchroom filled with staff, grad students, and postdoctoral fellows who gathered over a celebratory cake, added:

Obviously, the excitement today is primarily, for me, about the science. The freedom to use stem cells to explore ways to replenish our bodies, repair injury, and combat disease, is what has always driven us, and today we learn that the government will support this quest rather than stand in the way. And I think patients everywhere will be cheering us on, imploring us to work faster, harder, and with all of our ability to find new treatments.

But, it is difficult to hear the cheering of the people who could have been born had not their stem cells been extracted at their embryonic state in order to make this science possible. Collective denial is going on in these laboratories and the redefinition of words.

Melton continued:

This day marks an important change in spirit, in our national outlook. I think sometimes of how Aug. 9, 2001, was a dark day for science and for America because political ideology was used to define how science should be done. It’s terrific to hear our nation’s leader stating forcibly that science should guide policies, scientific facts should inform our thinking and decisions. Science as a way of knowing is a very powerful tool for good and it is liberating to hear that science, not political ideology, will guide the Obama administration in its decisions. I was always uncomfortable being put in the position of being an opponent of my own government of being set up in opposition to what the previous administration implied was an ethical approach to science when in fact it was not an ethical decision made on 9 August, 2001, but a political decision. I am deeply happy to say that those days are done (Colen, 2009).

These latter remarks in particular show to what extent research scientists will go to bend the meaning of words to further their agenda. It all depends on one's personal outlook as to what such statements as "stand in the way" and "discovery being shackled back for political purposes" mean.

It is the government's obligation to "stand in the way" when a citizen is being harmed. It is the government's duty to have medical experiments harmful to human life "shackled." That is why we have the police and laws on violence against others. "Political purposes" are also carried out by the will of the people so that this protection can be put in place by laws formulated by legislatures.

During his remarks before reversing the Bush executive order, Obama spoke about the importance of ensuring that scientific issues are decided on the basis of scientific facts:

Promoting science isn't just about providing resources—it's also about protecting free and open inquiry. It's about letting scientists … do their jobs free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it's inconvenient—especially when it's inconvenient.

And recall that Obama summed this all up by saying:

It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda—and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.

When stem cell proponents claim this controversy is all about "political agendas" or "politics" or "political ideology," they are unwittingly right: it is all about their political agendas, their politics and their political ideology, namely, the sanctioning of genocide against the unborn.

We are entering an era that runs the risk of coming under the tyranny of science, that is, where science, not informed ethical decisions, rule.

Cloning
And this all has the high potential of leading to one end: cloning.

Unable to differentiate embryonic stem cells in the laboratory outside the embryo, the coalition of government and leading medical researchers is setting its sites on using a shortcut: achieving its goals by putting the cells of a patient into a denucleated egg using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), then harvesting those cells. This is cloning. It involves the destruction of an egg by taking its insides out, followed by the implantation of skin cells from a patient into that empty egg, creating an embryo, which in turn is allowed to grow for awhile in a Petri dish, then destroyed to retrieve differentiated cells. Both the egg and the embryo are discarded.

On October 32, 2001, Bert Vogelstein, a Professor of Oncology and Pathology at the John Hopkins Oncology Center and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, testified before the US Senate as the chairman of the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine Committee on the Biological and Biomedical Applications of Stem Cell Research. He spoke on the recently released report Stem Cells and the Future of Regenerative Medicine Vogelstein said:

Our final recommendation is that in conjunction with research on stem cell biology and the development of stem cell therapies, research on the problem of transplant rejection should also be actively pursued. A substantial obstacle to the success of transplantation of any cells, including stem cells and their derivatives, is the immune reaction of a patient’s body to cells that it perceives as foreign. Multiple approaches to reducing this problem should be explored, including ways to manipulate the genetic makeup of the stem cell tissue to make it less likely to provoke an immune reaction, and the creation of stem cells using a technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer. This involves taking the DNA from a cell of a patient in need of a transplant, inserting it into an egg cell that has had its nucleus removed, and triggering cell division. The resulting stem cells and tissue that can be obtained from this procedure would be genetically identical to the patient’s, and would in theory not be rejected by the patient’s immune system when transplanted into him or her.

Somataic cell nuclear transfer can be used for either "therapeutic cloning" or "reproductive cloning." As Vogelstein explained:

This procedure should not be confused with reproductive cloning which utilizes a similar technique for the purpose of implanting an embryo and creating a child. The issue of reproductive cloning is being looked at by another National Academies committee, which will issue its findings soon.

Several months later, those findings were announced.

On January 24, 2002, in similar testimony before the Senate Subcommittee, Irv Weissman, a professor at Stanford Medical School, testified as chair of the National Academies Panel on Scientific and Medical Aspects of Human Cloning, which had released its report on January 18, 2002. The charge of the panel was to examine the scientific and medical issues relevant to human reproductive cloning, including the protection of human subjects. They claimed that the panel did not extend its examination to include ethical issues. He said that the panel concluded that:

Human reproductive cloning should not now be practiced. It is dangerous and likely to fail. The panel therefore unanimously supports the proposal that there should be a legally enforceable ban on the practice of human reproductive cloning.

Reproductive cloning produces a child that is essentially identical to the person from which the body cell was taken. But, he noted, their conclusions did not preclude somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) for the purposes of therapeutic cloning. He said:

Finally, the scientific and medical considerations that justify a ban on human reproductive cloning at this time are not applicable to nuclear transplantation to produce stem cells. Because of the considerable potential for developing new medical therapies for life-threatening diseases and advancing fundamental knowledge, the panel supports the conclusion of a recent National Academies report that recommended that biomedical research using nuclear transplantation to produce stem cells be permitted. A broad national dialogue on the societal, religious, and ethical issues is encouraged on this matter.

While the panel found that "reproductive cloning" should be banned, their were "no scientific or medical reasons to ban" therapeutic cloning. He continued:

Scientists place high value on the freedom of inquiry--a freedom that underlies all forms of scientific and medical research. Recommending restriction of research is a serious matter, and the reasons for such a restriction must be compelling. In the case of human reproductive cloning, we are convinced that the potential dangers to the implanted fetus, to the newborn, and to the woman carrying the fetus constitute just such compelling reasons. In contrast, there are no scientific or medical reasons to ban nuclear transplantation to produce stem cells, and such a ban would certainly close avenues of promising scientific and medical research.

Note that the recommendation to ban reproductive cloning and allow therapeutic cloning were said to be based on "scientific" assessments, but not ethical. According to the panel, the reason that research on reproductive cloning should be banned is because of the potential dangers such experimentation poses following the implantation of the embryo "to the implanted fetus, to the newborn, and to the woman carrying the fetus."

Dangers pre-emplantation, that is, dangers to the embryo in the laboratory, were irrelevant to the panel.

Under the guise of being objective and "scientific" the panel is making political and ethical evaluations, namely, that as a human being the embryo does not count. In short, it does not deserve the protection of society. It is O.K. to expose an embryo to harm in the laboratory, but not in the womb.

This is discrimination. And a strange dichotomy of values is going on here. The Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade legally allows harming an implanted fetus, namely, it allows abortion. But somehow, a cloned fetus does deserve protection from harm in the minds of the panel. Why this twisting and turning of terms? By making a public pronuncement of giving up reproductive cloning in one hand, the panel is attempting to grab what it really wants with the other hand: access to the human embryo for research.

Echoing the findings of the pane, Obama in his executive order said, "And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society.”

The word "wrong," and the phrase "has no place in our society, or any society" are ethical terms. However, they were used concerning "reproductive" not "therapeutic" cloning, and thus, by the absence of such a reference, keeps the door open on therapeutic cloning.

In fact, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican, believes the executive order does, indeed, open doors to cloning and embryonic abuses.

"Frankly, federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research can bring on embryo harvesting, perhaps even human cloning that occurs," Cantor said. "We don't want that. That shouldn't be done. That's wrong." (Embryonic stem cell reversal is distraction, congressman says, 2009)."

And how does the executive order open doors? As mentioned, by providing funding and legitimacy to scientific institutions and organizations that have cloning as their stated goal. Further, there are no laws against cloning, nor prohibitions concerning embryonic creation or destruction, only against the federal funding of cloning and the creation and destruction of embryos. By diminishing the status of the embryo through his executive order, Obama has put his foot into the door leading to their destruction.

What's the difference?
And what is the difference between therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning? In reproductive cloning the embryo is implanted and allowed to develop. In therapeutic cloning, the embryo is killed within several days and the stem cells harvested and placed in Petri dishes, allowed to multiply, then studied and experimented on. So the difference is between life and death. Ironically, it could be argued that reproductive cloning is more moral, for it has the potential of allowing the embyo to live.

Thomas P. Zwaka

Even the new iPS technology--where stem cells are created from skin cells, not embryos--does not obviate the need to clone.

"Does this mean that SCNT can be discarded, that it should become a relic like mouth pipetting?" asked Thomas P. Zwalka, at the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy and the Departments of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, in "What comes after iPS?" carried in Nature.

His answer: "Absolutely not!" He explained:

Though pressure from religious and other groups might shift the field away from ES cells and toward iPS cells regardless of scientific merit, the scientific questions SCNT can address overlap only marginally with those that can be tackled through direct reprogramming. SCNT allows the study of how epigenetic [cellular differentiation] and genetic components contribute to the earliest steps of development. Introducing pluripotency factors, on the other hand, does not produce an embryo, nor does it allow one to study the events occurring as an embryo forms...(Zwaka, 2006)

This is a stricking statement. Notice that the study of epigenetics, that is, cellular differentiation, is stated to require the study of human embryos. Differentiation is the hardest nut to crack in regenerative medicine's goal to produce organs that can be transplanted without rejection. So, embryonic investigation is central to this end. And that means embryonic destruction.

Leading scientists agree that while iPS cells hold promise, continued research on human embryonic stem cells is essential. "[H]uman embryonic stem cells are still, and will continue to be, the gold standard for research on pluripotency and differentiation," according to researchers at a press conference at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Philadelphia. Speakers included such renound stem cell researchers as George Daley of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Shinya Yamanaka from Kyoto University, and Rudolph Jaenisch from the Whitehead Institute (Gawrylewski, 2008).

Indeed, without earlier research on how human embryonic stem cells maintain pluripotency and differentiate, the reprogramming studies leading to iPS technology could never have been done, noted Yamanaka, whose group first published on reprogramming somatic cells into stem cell-like cells.

"We need new human embryonic stem cells," Jaenisch said. "They differ enormously from iPS cells..."

In short, the human embryo remains a prime target of regenerative research. And indeed, researchers are currently moving from the study of stem cell lines to the human embryo itself.

Dr. Robert Lanza

Because of the presently insurmountable problems associated with differentiation in the laboratory without using the full embryo, researchers are turning their attention to the creation of cloned embryos for therapy and the engineering of spare human parts. Leading the charge into this controversial arena is Robert Lanza, M.D., chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) and adjunct professor at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Lanza explains in a Discovery Magazine interview "Fighting for the Right to Clone":

You can do all kinds of tricks with embryonic stem cells, but if they come from another individual, you still have the problem of rejection. You still need powerful immunosuppressive drugs that cause cancer. My idea was to clone the sick individual, not for reproduction but for therapy. The stem cells produced through this therapeutic cloning would, like other embryonic stem cells, be capable of developing into many cell types and serve as a repair system for whatever part of the body required replenishment at the time. You solve the rejection problem, and you have unlimited amounts of tissue.

However, moving from theory to reality has proven elusive.

"We injected human DNA from an adult cell into an egg from which the nucleus had been removed," Landa noted, concerning work done in his laboratory. "We managed to clone early-stage embryos that grew to four or six cells in size. This was obviously far short of getting stem cells, which require a blastocyst [an embryo with a larger cluster of cells]. In fact, even to this day, a decade after the cloning of Dolly, scientists still have not cloned human embryos developed enough to generate patient-specific cells (Weintraub, 2008)."

But the quest involving experimentation on human life continues.

3.

One way the Supreme Court exempted the embryo and the fetus from society's protection was by ruling that the unborn were not persons and therefore not entitled to the protection of the 14th Amendment.

Smoke and mirrors
As one reads through the literature of this controversy, one begins to see that it is not the definition of what it means to be human that is causing the problem, but instead the objectives of science. Bending meaning is just a way to get what you want, namely, to study without restraint human embryos and human stem cells in the hopes of finding medical cures. Quibbling over what is a human being and what is a person, and when a person becomes a person, is merely smoke and mirrors.

"Smoke and mirrors" is a metaphor for a deceptive, fraudulent or insubstantial explanation or description. The source of the name is based on magicians' illusions, where magicians make objects appear or disappear by extending or retracting mirrors amid a confusing burst of smoke. The expression may have a connotation of virtuosity or cleverness in carrying out such a deception. "Smoke and mirrors" can refer to any sort of presentation by which the audience is intended to be deceived, such as an attempt to fool a prospective client into thinking that one has capabilities necessary to deliver a product in question.

In embryonic stem cell research, the product in question is a cure for this or that disease. Note that research involving embryonic stem cells has provided no cures, just a lot of talk and a lot of money being funneled into research projects. There is a high probability that this is pseudo-science.

Just like slavery, there is a lot of money to be gained by discriminating against the unborn.

Who is a person? A legal answer

Defining what a person is by terms in a dictionary or by assumption really does not matter in this war to liberate the embryo, for they have no binding force. What does matter are legal definitions, definitions created by legislatures, and protections of embryonic and fetal life by law. But smoke and mirrors occurs here, too. The prime example is the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade which declared war against the unborn in the guise of emancipating women and their doctors, and by defining in this war that a fetus is not a person.

The problem with this particular display of smoke and mirrors is that the magician is the U.S. Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, and by the magic of legal interpretation they have stripped the unborn of what it means to be human. And not only that--it has stripped away what it means to have life. That is strong magic, indeed.

One of the prime movers in this opinion was Justice Harry Blackmun, who described himself as a champion of the "little people." (But, apparently not as little as an embryo or fetus.) At a White House news conference announcing his retirement, he was asked to explain the decision's continuing importance. Justice Blackmun said: "I think it's a step that had to be taken as we go down the road toward the full emancipation of women."

According to the New York Times, the premise of the opinion was that unwanted pregnancy presents women with potential medical and social problems that "the woman and her responsible physician necessarily will consider in consultation" when deciding how to proceed. The point of view, reflecting Justice Blackmun's sympathy for the medical profession developed during a decade as general counsel to the Mayo Clinic, was that of a doctor seeking the ability to exercise informed medical judgment about a patient's problem without government intrusion (Greenhouse, 1994).

So the goal of the decision that enslaved the unborn was to free women and doctors from government restraints. Under that ruling the womb became a ghetto for the unborn, a plantation, a concentration camp, where anything is permissible against those who inhabit it by those who control it.

Being unprotected by law, the same tyrannical rule concerning abortion extends to embryonic human life.>p/>

One way the Supreme Court exempted the embryo and the fetus from society's protection was by ruling that the unborn were not persons and therefore not entitled to the protection of the 14th Amendment.

In part, the 14th Amendment states that:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The 14th Amendment was one of three amendments know as the Civil War amendments, namely, amendments 13, 14 and 15.

The 13th Amendment, approved in 1865, prohibits slavery or involuntary servitude. The Fourteenth Amendment was passed to secure the rights of former slaves.

The 14th Amendment, added to the Constitution in 1868, defined citizenship in such a way that state governments could not deny former slaves their rights and privileges as citizens. This amendment says that all people born in the United States are citizens, as are all individuals who are naturalized (foreign-born persons who become citizens through a legal process defined by Congress). According to Amendment 14, all citizens (natural-born and naturalized) have the same legal rights and privileges. This amendment forbids state governments from making and enforcing laws that would deprive any person of life, liberty, or property “without due process of law”; it also says that a state government may not deny to any person under its authority “the equal protection of the laws (US Supreme Court: constitutional amendments, 2009).”

As the court noted, if those opposing the legalization of abortion were correct in arguing that the fetus is a “person,” then the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Fourteenth Amendment. Abortion would not be permissible.

However, in Roe. v. Wade, the court stated:

...no case could be cited that holds that a fetus is a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment...All this, together with our observation...that throughout the major portion of the 19th century prevailing legal abortion practices were far freer than they are today, persuades us that the word “person,” as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn...In short, the unborn have never been recognized in the law as persons in the whole sense.

The unborn: non-living non-persons
The Supreme Court, thus, denied that an unborn person is a person and, instead, held that the unborn in effect has the same status as a slave or an animal. Not being a person means it has no rights of a citizen and can be made a slave for medical science or killed like an animal.

According to Bouvier’s Law Dictionary, 1856 edition, a slave is “a man who is by law deprived of his liberty for life, and becomes the property of another...A slave has no political rights, and generally has no civil rights...In general a slave is considered a thing and not a person.”

In a further effort to bastardize meaning, the justices stated in their opinion that, in essence, the fetus does not have life. The majority made the following points in their opinion, that:

There has always been strong support for the view that life does not begin until live birth...

...the Church who would recognize the existence of life from the moment of conception... Substantial problems for precise definition of this view are posed, however, by new embryological data that purport to indicate that conception is a "process" over time, rather than an event, and by new medical techniques such as menstrual extraction, the "morning-after" pill, implantation of embryos, artificial insemination, and even artificial wombs...

...the fetus, at most, represents only the potentiality of life...

The Random House Webster's College Dictionary (1990) defines life as "the general condition that distinguishes organism from inorganic objects and dead organisms" and conception as "fertilization; the formation of a zygote from the union of sperm and egg." The justrices merely re-define what life and conception are. "Life" is defined as the state of being after birth and "conception" as a process, that is, growth, instead of what it is, the beginning of a new being. According to the majority opinion, the fetus is, in essence, not living inside the womb. Further, having only potentiality, the fetus has no standing as a human being. Having only potentiality, the decision made it legal to surgically end this potentiality.

Thus reasoning more suitable for "Saturday Night Live" than to the highest court of our land was used to justify abortion, leaving the fetus and the embryo unprotected by law.

Other governments
Other governments have defined away a group’s status as human beings to achieve their political and scientific objectives. For instance, the Jews, according to the Nazis, while a race, were nonhuman, that is, organisms. In a speech in May 1923 Hitler declared: "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human (Center for Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies: Propaganda, 2009)."

Quoting from John Whitehead's The Stealing of America (p. 15) , Jerry Bergman in "The Influence of Evolution on Nazi Race Programs" noted:

The Jews, labeled subhumans, became nonbeings. It was both legal and right to exterminate them in the collectivist and evolutionist viewpoint. They were not considered... persons in the sight of the German government.

And quoting from Raymond Rudorff's Studies in Ferocity ( p. 240), Bergman wrote:

In Auschwitz, the inmates were "No longer persons. . .[but] simply goods to be processed in the gigantic death-factory he had organized (Bergman, 2009)."

Nazi medical experiments
During the Nazi era, medical doctors with notebooks in hand carefully documented data from medical experiments on human subjects. In a laboratory setting, they put Russian soldiers and Jewish prisoners into freezing vats of water to see how long it took for them to freeze and thaw out. The objective was to save the lives of German pilots who were shot down over the Atlantic.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, in “The Dilemmas of Experimenting on People,” MIT Technology Review, July 1997, noted that:

Victim of a Nazi medical experi-ment is immersed in icy water at the Dachau concentration camp. SS doctor Sigmund Rascher oversees the experiment. Germany, 1942.

Other experiments for military purposes included forcing subjects to drink only seawater to determine how long pilots could survive once downed in the ocean and establishing the point at which lungs exploded due to atmospheric pressures, an important issue for fighter pilots seeking to avoid anti-aircraft fire. An estimated 100,000 human beings died horrible deaths in the course of experiments at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and other camps.

And then there was Dr. Joseph Mengele, probably the most infamous Nazi medical researcher. He became known as the Angel of Death for his role in selecting who lived or died at Auschwitz and for his experimentation on human twins.

Dr. Josef Mengele

He was born in 1911, in Günzburg, near Ulm, the eldest son of Karl Mengele, a prosperous manufacturer of farming implements. In 1935 Mengele earned a Ph.D. in physical anthropology from the University of Munich. In 1937 at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, he became the assistant of Dr. Otmar von Verschuer, a leading scientific figure widely known for his research with twins.

In 1937 Mengele joined the Nazi Party. The following year he received his medical degree and joined the SS, volunteering for medical service. He began work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics, directed by his former mentor von Verschuer. He was then transfer to Auschwitz.

Renate and Rene Guttmann were subjected to injection and x-ray experiments by Josef Mengele. Courtesy of USHMM

Here he became interested in utilizing twins for medical research through Verschuer, who had experimented with identical and fraternal twins in order to trace the genetic origins of various diseases (Josef Mengele, 2009). As a medical officer there, his duties included standing on the ramp as incoming prisoners came off the trains. With the flick of his finger or a riding crop, a person would either be sent to the left or to the right, to the gas chamber or to hard labor. Of particular interest to him were twins (he would shout "Zwillinge!" meaning twins) and others with unique hereditary traits, such as dwarfs, giants, or persons with a club foot or heterochromia (each eye a different color).

Following selection, the twins were tattooed, given a number from a special sequence, then taken to the twin's barracks where they were required to fill out a form. The form asked for a brief history and basic measurements such as age and height. They were then subjected to experiments, including mass transfusions of blood from one twin to another, attempts to fabricate blue eyes by means of drops or injections of chemicals into the eyes and injections into the spine and spinal taps with no anesthesia. Diseases, including typhus and tuberculosis, would be purposely given to one twin and not the other. When one died, the other was often killed to examine and compare the effects of the disease. Various surgeries without anesthesia were performed, including organ removal, castration, and amputations (Rosenberg, 2010).

Twins were deemed of special use because twins are natural clones, having the same genetic composition.

Pseudo-science
In the minds of many, embryonic stem cell research is a pseudo-science, just as the Nazi medical experiments on Jewish and Russian prisoners have been labeled a pseudo-science.

Genocide is the mass killing of a group of people. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) as:

...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

With regard to stem cell research, the relevant group in question are the unborn.

As noted in "The ethics of using medical data from Nazi experiments," Doctor Leonard Hoenig, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of South Florida College of Medicine, categorized the Nazi experiments as "pseudo-science," since the Nazis blurred the distinction between science and sadism. He said that the data was inspired and administered through racial ideologies of genocide, maintaining that nothing scientific could have resulted from sadism.

Allen Buchanan, Philosophy Professor at the University of Arizona and a member of the Human Subjects Review Committee at the University of Minnesota, believes that bad ethics and bad science are inextricably linked together. He found that the human experiments that were ethically sound were also scientifically sound. Therefore, he concluded that since the Nazi experiments were unethical, they were, by equation, scientifically invalid.

The Nazis even perverted scientific terminology. Their experimental "control subjects" suffered the most and died. "Sample size" meant truck loads of Jews. "Significance" was an indication of misery, and "response rate" was a measure of torment (Cohen, 2009).

So, too, regarding embryonic stem cell research. The term "therapeutic cloning," involves no therapy at all for the embryo used to create a clone, but instead its destruction. Vis-a-vis embryonic stem cell research, "laboratory" is really a euphemism for extermination center, where numerous embryos are experimented on, subjecting one after the other to a systematic death--and then multiplying their gutted cellular remains in Petri dishes. The scientific pleasure researches find in such study involving lethal medical actions can be none other than sadistic. Definitions of sadism include, "pleasure in being cruel" and "extreme cruelty."

In the end, those engaging in immoral scientific experiments often are punished. But, sometimes they are not. Regardless, in ethics, science does not trump morality--some just escape justice.

Following the Second World War, 23 Nazi doctors and medical scientists were put on trial for performing cruel and inhuman experiments on concentration-camp inmates--as the prosecutor said, for “murders, tortures, and other atrocities committed in the name of medical science.”

Of the 23 professionals tried at Nuremberg, 15 were convicted. Seven of them were condemned to death by hanging and eight received prison sentences from 10 years to life. Eight professionals were acquitted (Mitscherlich 1992).

And what made people like Dr. Mengele do what they did for science? Robert Jay Lifton, distinguished professor of psychiatry and psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, has this opinion:

The psychological traits Mengele brought to Auschwitz exist in many of us, but in him they took exaggerated form. His impulse toward omnipotence and total control of the world around him were means of fending off anxiety and doubt, fears of falling apart--ultimately, fear of death. That fear also activated his sadism and extreme psychic numbing. He could quiet his fears of death in that death-dominated environment by performing the ultimate act of power over another person: murder.

Yet, as far as we know, he had neither killed nor maimed prior to Auschwitz, and had in fact functioned in a more or less integrated way. The perfect match between Mengele and Auschwitz changed all that... Under certain kinds of psychological and moral conditions it [evil potential] can emerge. Crucial to that emergence is an ideology or world view, a theory or vision that justifies or demands evil actions (Lifton, 1985).

This ideology that condones the sacrifice of human life for science is endemic to many associated with stem cell research.

Dr. Mengele escaped punishment. Following the end of World War II, he fled to South America. He settled for awhile in Buenos Aires, "where he had a reputation as a specialist in abortions," according to the New York Times (Nash,1992). He is believed to have died in 1979 on the beach at a resort in Bertioga, Brazil, after suffering a stroke while swimming in the sea (Josef Mengele, 2010). A skeleton exhumed from a grave in Embu was varied by numerous scientists from various countries to be his according to DNA analysis. Sought by German authorities and Israel's Mossad, he had avoided capture for 34 years.

A crime writer, Leighton Gage, who lives in Brazil went to see his grave site. He wrote this blog on his musing over that grave:

The first thing that struck me was how different Mengele’s youth had been from that of so many other Nazis. He was born to wealth and privilege. As a youth, he was popular and well-liked. He made people laugh. They nicknamed him Beppo, drawing it from the name of a popular circus clown. He was intelligent and an intellectual. He achieved doctorates in two disciplines from two different universities. He was a decorated war hero and served with distinction on the Eastern front.

And then he went to Auschwitz and spent twenty one months there. Only twenty-one months, but it was enough time for him to betray all of his early promise, sink to the depths of degradation, and perform unspeakable horrors.

After the war he fled, first to Southern Germany, then to South America. When the war ended he was 34. When he died, he was 68. He was on the run for half his lifetime.

His son, Rolf, visited him in Brazil not long before the end. Mengele was in no way repentant for what he’d done and told him, “Personally, I never harmed anyone in my entire life.” (Murder is everywhere, 2009)

The Nuremberg Code
Stemming from the trials at Nuremberg, a set of 10 medical research ethics principles for human experimentation were established called the Nuremberg Code. The ten points include that:

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.
The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur.

Stem cell research fails all these ethical guidelines.

Right of informed consent
This principle concerning informed consent was codified into United States law under the Code of Federal Regulations for the protection of human subjects. Under section 46.116 it stipulates that:

...no investigator may involve a human being as a subject in research covered by this policy unless the investigator has obtained the legally effective informed consent of the subject or the subject's legally authorized representative. An investigator shall seek such consent only under circumstances that provide the prospective subject or the representative sufficient opportunity to consider whether or not to participate and that minimize the possibility of coercion or undue influence.

This code was based, in part, on the Belmont Report of 1979, which resulted from a study by the National Commission for the Protections of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behaviorall Research. The commission investigated the ethical principles that should govern medical research, utilizing the Nuremberg Code to formulate its findings.

Several basic principles were identified, among them that an individual should be treated as an autonomous agent capable of self-determination and that a person with diminished autonomy was entitled to protection from harm.

Likewise, the , Declaration of Helsinki, adopted by the 18th World Medical Assembly June 1964 in Helsinki, Finland, established a set of ethical principles for the medical community regarding human experimentation and is widely regarded as the cornerstone document of human research ethics. According to the Office of Human Subjects Research (OHSR), which operates within National Institutes of Health (NIH), some of these guidelines include that:

In medical research on human subjects, considerations related to the well-being of the human subject should take precedence over the interests of science and society.

Medical research is subject to ethical standards that promote respect for all human beings and protect their health and rights. Some research populations are vulnerable and need special protection. The particular needs of the economically and medically disadvantaged must be recognized. Special attention is also required for those who cannot give or refuse consent for themselves, for those who may be subject to giving consent under duress, for those who will not benefit personally from the research and for those for whom the research is combined with care.

It is the duty of the physician in medical research to protect the life, health, privacy, and dignity of the human subject.

Medical research involving human subjects must conform to generally accepted scientific principles, be based on a thorough knowledge of the scientific literature, other relevant sources of information, and on adequate laboratory and, where appropriate, animal experimentation.

Medical research is only justified if there is a reasonable likelihood that the populations in which the research is carried out stand to benefit from the results of the research.

Destroying an embryo or a fetus potentially would thus not be permissible as such medical investigations would violate a number of ethical principles, for neither the embryo or the fetus are capable of giving informed consent, nor are they autonomous agents capable of self-determination, nor are they protected from harm by the research performed on them.

Moreover, one of the basic arguments of the stem cell industry is deemed unethical by the Helsinki Declaration, namely, that exploiting the unborn, the embryo, (the human subject) for the benefit of those already born (society) is a medically worthy pursuit. And, in the same vein, such research would be held unethical because the research would obviously not benefit the population of embryos or fetuses on which the research has been carried out, because such research destroys that very population.

4.

If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed by the [14th] Amendment. (Roe v. Wade)

But, all these ethical protections do not apply to the unborn if they are not deemed to be persons. Medical researchers apparently can wink at these ethical guidelines because of the current no-man's land in which the embryo and the fetus find themselves.

Ruby’s bill
A bill, HB 1572, by Rep. Dan Ruby, a Republican from North Dakota, would have attempted to set in motion steps that had the potential of changing the non-person status of the embryo, and thereby protect it from harm. His legislation sought to define as a human being "any organism with the genome of homo sapiens." The "personhood" status would include a developing embryo from the moment of conception, whether inside or outside the womb.

Dan Ruby

However, in April 2009, North Dakota's Senate rejected the legislation by a vote of 29 to 16 (Wetzel, 2009).

Sen. Curtis Olafson, a Republican, spoke out frequently against the bill, saying it would make it difficult for doctors to treat problem pregnancies that could threaten the woman's life because both she and her unborn child would have equal status under the law.

At a Senate hearing on the legislation, two reproductive endocrinologists testified that the bill would complicate the practice of in vitro fertilization, which involves removing eggs from a woman's body, fertilizing them in a laboratory, and implanting a fertilized egg inside the womb.

What would this bill have achieved? Ruby, in an email to me March 14, said that:

So if applied correctly it would mean someone cannot violate a person’s rights no matter whether they are born or not. As for stem cell research on embryos, I am not in favor of that practice now. We have gained so much more from using cord blood and stem cells from adults than from embryonic stem cells. I think there is a possibility this bill could be applied to protect life at the embryonic stage even before implantation.

Planned Parenthood groups claimed the legislation represented a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade.

“HB 1572 is dangerous, far reaching and allows the government, not women and families, to make critical decisions about health care,” said Sarah Stoesz, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Minnesota. Plus, Stoesz claimed, the bill "could also outlaw contraception as well as medical procedures used to treat tubal pregnancies and infertility."

“Women and families, not politicians, should decide what’s best for their unique circumstances," she said. "Whether the issue is abortion, birth control, or in vitro fertilization, women, in consultation with doctors should make these personal medical decisions."

“This bill is not representative of the majority of North Dakotans, it is merely another attempt by a narrow minority fixated on an agenda that most Americans simply don’t support,” Stoesz said (Abortion Ban in North Dakota House Will Challenge Roe v Wade Decision, Deny Women Access to Contraception, 2009).

Once again, medical science, namely, "women, in consultation with doctors," is being used to counter moral decisions. It is interesting to note, however, that a claim to science by pro-choice advocates is being used in opposition to a scientific definition of what it means to be human by pro-life legislation, namely, Ruby’s bill.

Ruby believes that by treating a fertilized egg as a person, North Dakota would gain a strategy for arguing in the federal courts that states should have the right to define when life begins.

Gualberto Garcia Jones, a former attorney for the American Life League in Washington, D.C., argued the legislation offers a new angle in the legal struggle over abortion rights.

It attempts to avoid existing U.S. Supreme Court decisions, which have focused on the right to privacy, in favor of asserting that the Constitution's 10th Amendment gives states the right to regulate abortion, Jones said.

The strength of Ruby's bill is that it does not directly mention abortion, embryonic stem-cell research ''or any other hot-button issue,'' Jones said. ''Instead, it asserts the fundamental right of a state to govern itself.''

North Dakota and other states then would regain the authority to regulate abortion, Ruby said. He said his legislation “applies the protections of our existing laws to babies who are irrefutably distinguishable from the mothers carrying them" (Senate panel hears arguments on ‘person’ egg bill, 2009). However, as noted, it was defeated.

This bill, and others, are aimed in part at reversing the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, for the justices, in their opinion, admit that the decision could not hold if the fetus was to be defined as a person. Roe v. Wade states:

If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed by the [14th] Amendment.

This challenge remains. Given the defeat of Ruby's “Personhood Bill,” how does one craft future legislation that would have a better chance of passing, yet still give the embryo and the fetus protection from harm?

Other similar attempts at establishing the personhood of the embryo, such as a constitutional amendment in Colorado, have been defeated also. Amendment 48 would have defined a person as "any human being from the moment of fertilization."

It was placed on the ballot in 2008 largely by the work of law student and pro-life activist Kristi Brown (then Burton; she recently married), who worked up to 18 hours a day collecting nearly double the 76,000 signatures she needed to get it on the ballot. In the days leading up to the vote on Nov. 4, 2008, Brown had 2,000 volunteers in 500 churches working to pass Amendment 48. Coloradoans voted definitively against the measure, 73 to 27.

Sitting at a table (described as her "office") at her parent's home in Peyton, Colorado, 21-year-old law student Kristi Burton (now Brown) helped spearhead a movement to amend Colorado's state constitution that would have granted the status of a person to embryonic life.

But that has not stopped the personhood movement. According to a Newsweek article with the descriptive heading: "I Am Zygote, Hear Me Roar: A new generation of anti-abortion activists pushes for laws that define personhood as beginning at conception," now, just one year after its founding, Personhood USA has 37 state-level affiliates, seven of which are already gathering signatures for potential 2010 votes. One recent report estimates that the leading personhood groups have raised nearly $60 million in the past five years (Kliff, 2009).

In fact, a new amendment is being proposed in Colorado for 2010, which would define a person as "every human being from the beginning of the biological development of that human being." Specifically, it reads:

An amendment to the Colorado Constitution applying the term 'person' as used in those provisions of the Colorado Constitution relating to inalienable rights, equality of justice and due process of law, to every human being from the beginning of the biological development of that human being (Bartels, 2009).

Note that 2010 proposed amendment does not have the word "fertilization" in it.

According to Gualberto Garcia Jones, Colorado Personhood director and proponent of the initiative, the change in language was made in order to be more "comprehensive in our definition of a person." For example, Jones noted that the new language now accounts for human beings created through asexual reproduction in laboratories. "Fertilization would not have properly applied to asexually reproduced humans, but even asexually reproduced human beings have a definite biological beginning," said Jones.

It appears that this modification is a direct aim at establishing the legal groundwork that would prohibit human cloning, specifically somatic cell nuclear transfer.

In press conference announcing the new personhood campaign for Colorado's 2010 elections, Jones said:

Over half-a-million Coloradoans voted for the personhood initiative in 2008. Their votes acknowledging the God-given right to life of the pre-born revolutionizes the pro-life movement and encourage us toward victory (Boven, 2009).

A number of bill directed at defining what it means to be a person have been introduced at the the federal level, both in the House and the Sentate. They all remain in committee. For instance:

H.R. 227, Sanctity of Human Life Act, introduced January 7, 2009, declares that: (1) the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human and is the person's paramount and most fundamental right; (2) each human life begins with fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent, at which time every human has all legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood; and (3) Congress, each state, the District of Columbia, and all U.S. territories have the authority to protect all human lives (H.R. 227, 2009).

H.R. 881, called the “Right to Life Act," introduced February 4, 2009, declares that the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being beginning at the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual comes into being. It prohibits construing this Act to authorize the prosecution of any woman for the death of her unborn child(H.R. 881, 2009).

S. 346, called the "Life at Conception Act," introduced January 29, 2009, declares that the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being beginning at the moment of fertilization, cloning, and other moment at which an individual comes into being (S. 346, 2009).

Introduced bills and resolutions first go to committees that deliberate, investigate, and revise them before they go to general debate. The majority of bills and resolutions never make it out of committee.

If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong
"If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," Abraham Lincoln once said (President Abraham Lincoln, 2009). That statement, applied to the slaves over which the American Civil War was fought, also pertains to the embryo and the fetus. The very littlest people are being subjected to involuntary servitude. They are being treated as slaves and their lives are being shed to enrich the slave owners--and if that is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

Writing for Time Magazine, Alice Parker said in "Researchers Cheer Obama's Vote for Stem-Cell Science:"

But Monday's Executive Order is less about pitting the promise of one type of stem cell against another's and more about re-establishing the authority of science, of ensuring that any and every potentially useful avenue of research will be pursued to its end (Parker, 2009).

Indeed. What we are dealing with is an attempt to make science the ultimate authority, not the Judeo-Christian ethic which states "Thou shalt not kill."

Twisting meaning is just a means to helping one bolster ones goal, namely, to provide justifications for obtaining scientific supremacy. It is propaganda for the uber-scientists. For instance, Melton, who has campaigned for access to federal funding of embryonic stem cells, offers this convolution of meaning to support his stance. In Time Magazine in "Stem-Cell Research: The Quest Resumes," Alice Park relates:

At Harvard, Melton teaches a frequently oversubscribed undergraduate course on science and ethics, in which he uses his keen sense of logic to provoke. When the class discussed the morality of embryonic-stem-cell research, Melton invited Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to present arguments against the field. Melton asked Doerflinger if he considered a day-old embryo and a 6-year-old to be moral equivalents; when Doerflinger responded yes, Melton countered by asking why society accepts the freezing of embryos but not the freezing of 6-year-olds.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1874717-2,00.html January 29, 2009

Douglas Melton, co-director of Harvard Stem Cell Institute

That is a "keen sense of logic?" Being moral equivalents is not the same thing as being physical equivalents. The writer did not record Doeflinger's answer, but it could have been this: "Society accepts the freezing of embryos but not the freezing of 6-year-olds because at the embryonic level of a human being's development, freezing can preserve life, while at the age of six years, it kills.

Melton's comment may have brought laughter or a smile to his students, but it was not logical and did not bring the truth.

Next: the Dickey-Wicker Amendment
One of the big fronts in this battle is the Dickey-Wicker Amendment.

An editorial in Nature maps out the problem as research scientists see it (Embryonic education, 2009). It stated in part:

When US President Barack Obama lifted the funding ban for research on human embryonic stem cells earlier this month, he did not mention the Dickey–Wicker amendment—legislation that forbids the use of federal funds for research that destroys or creates embryos. It was a missed opportunity to begin a necessary conversation...

Because of this law, worthy projects will still be barred from federal funding despite Obama's action...

Scientists should also describe how they balance the status of human embryos with the potential benefits of research...

A key requirement for productive dialogue is a common frame of reference. Here, the word 'embryo' is a stumbling block. This term refers to everything from a newly fertilized single-celled egg to millions of cells organized into eyelids, ears, genitals and limbs. Yet the latter form, which is present some eight weeks after fertilization, is not only ethically unacceptable for research but also far too old to yield embryonic stem cells...

And why is it "ethically unacceptable" to harvest millions of cells of a developing embryo, as opposed to a lesser amount at an earlier stage? Because it is not utilitarian for medical researchers. Their ethics is limited to what is best for science, and embryonic stem cells do not exist at the latter stage of development of a human being.

Scientists in one way or the other keep saying, in effect, "Look at all the lives we can save," as they wink at the fact that in order to do this, they must take the lives of the unborn. It is the ethics of the "more good," namely, it is an ethics based on quantity. In such a world view, if 100 people's lives can be saved by taking the life of 10 people, then it is ethically acceptable to take those 10 lives. It is ethical decisions made on a scale. It is a balancing act. In short, what is good for society is above what is good for an individual.

"[M]any ethical lapses over the past century have been the result of placing the good of society before the good of the individual," noted Dr. Daniel Eisenberg, a physician with the Department of Radiology at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, where he teaches medical ethics. "In Jewish theology, the individual is of paramount importance."

"In terms of ethics, Judaism was the first religion to insist upon the dignity of the person and the sanctity of human life," he said. "For the first time, the individual could no longer be sacrificed for the group. Murder became not just a crime against man but a sin against God." He concluded:

Without a gold standard for comparison such as the Torah, situational ethics can become a very slippery slope. Murder becomes "mercy killing," destruction of fetal life becomes a "personal choice," and the basic rules of human dignity upon which society should be grounded erode beneath our feet .

In fact, the individual is viewed as an entire world. Eisenberg elaborated:

The Talmud teaches that the Almighty first created mankind as a single individual, rather than a group of people, to teach us that one who saves a single life saves a world, and one who destroys a single life, destroys an entire world. According to the Jewish view, the individual is a microcosm of the entire world (Eisenberg, 2009).

Kill the embryo of Einstein, Lincoln, Washingon, Newton, Edison or Abraham, and where would we be?

Let us say some day in the future, an atomic war emits so much radiation that it makes all individuals sterile. Let us say that in a remote, underground facility, several embryos capable of reproducing are found--the only such ones on the planet. Let us further say that these embryos are under the ownership of an institution devoted to stem cell research. They are requested to provide the embryos because they could repopulate earth. What do you think would be the response of the world if the institution said, "I am sorry, but we will not provide them to you, for they are not human." If everyone would consider them human under these circumstances, what changes if all of a sudden people found that they were not sterile, after all? What would change is the attitude of the people, not the embryos. They most likely would start providing rationales once again for the destruction of embryos because they are not really human persons, or for that matter, living, citing Roe v. Wade.

Deciding the embryo's fate
Most embryos are located in fertility clinics, where they have been frozen through a process called cryopreservation, preserving them for later use. About half a million frozen embryos exist today, with an additional 20,000 added yearly.

Cryopreservation of embryos, which are frozen at -196C in liquid nitrogen.

Cryopreservation involves slowly freezing embryos in an anti-freeze solution from body temperature down to -196°C, at which temperature they are stored in containers of liquid nitrogen. At these low temperatures, any biological activity, including the biochemical reactions that would lead to cell death, is effectively stopped. At a later date, they may be thawed and implanted in a woman to achieve pregnancy (Human Embryo Cryopreservation, 2010).

A RAND/SART survey in 2003 found that of the 400,000 frozen spare embryos 88.2% were designated for family building and 2.8% (11,000) were designated for research. Those embryos designated for research could produce as many as 275 stem cell lines (cell cultures suitable for further development, although the number in reality would be much lower). Of the remaining embryos, it is estimated that 2.3% (10,000) are awaiting donation, 2.2% are designated to be discarded, and 4.5% are held in storage for other reasons, including lost contact with a patient, patient death, abandonment, and divorce (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2009).

In dispute is what to do with them. They could be thawed and then destroyed, continued to be cryopreserved indefinitely, used for embryonic stem cell research, or offered for donation and adoption.

"If the embryo will be destroyed, it is far better to extract stem cells from it and find a cure for disease than not to do so," reasons Sherry F. Colb, a professor and Frederick B. Lacey scholar at Rutgers Law School in Newark. However, she said there is another perspective:

In the United States, we have one class of human beings that is legally slated and scheduled for destruction (and whose destruction is itself funded by state governments): convicted murderers sentenced to death. One could imagine a utilitarian scientist arguing that because people on death row are scheduled for execution, they ought to be available for scientific experimentation--even experimentation that risks death. After all, would it not be better for people we are going to kill to provide us first with useful information? Furthermore, a scientist might urge, if a condemned inmate's organs match someone in the population who needs a heart or a liver, we should be able to harvest those organs (under general anesthesia) prior to execution as well.

In fact, though, we do not permit compelled medical experimentation on death row inmates, nor do we require them to donate their organs prior to execution. A person on death row retains his right to refuse medical treatment, including--and especially --treatment designed to help people other than the recipient of the intervention.

On the assumption that embryos are persons, an opponent of stem cell research could therefore argue that if we are willing to respect the human rights of convicted murderers scheduled to die as punishment for their crimes, then it follows even more strongly that we should not perform experiments on innocent embryonic life, no matter what the benefits might be to other lives (Colb, 2006).

However, this latter argument is not as convincing to Colb as her first position that favors embryonic destruction in the hope of finding a solution to physical problems.

5.

The final solution
Society has gone down this road before, where giving up the lives of a few were permitted in order to save a greater number.

A case in point:

Following the invasion of Poland in 1939, the German government ordered the Jewish population of Lodz, numbering about 230,000 persons, to move to the northern portion of the city, where they were concentrated into a ghetto, living there with about 3 persons per room. The area was fenced off and no Jew was permitted out.

Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski was put in charge of the ghetto. He was a Jew and headed the Judenrat, the Jewish Council of Elders. Before the war, he had been an insurance agent, velvet factory manager, and director of an orphanage. He was responsible for providing heat, work, food, housing, and health and welfare services for the ghetto population (The Lodz Ghetto, 2010).

Two years after the formation of the ghetto, the SS raided the ghetto's hospital and loaded the sick onto trucks, throwing some children onto the trucks from windows. The victims were never seen again.

The SS was an abbreviation for "Schutzstaffel," German for "Protective Echelon." Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS, under Heinrich Himmler's command, was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II. Himmler oversaw all police and security forces, including the Gestapo, as well as the concentration camps and extermination centers. He used the SS to form an order of men, numbering about a million, who claimed to be superior in racial purity and ability to other Germans and national groups, a model for the Nazi vision of a master race.

A program of deportation of ghetto residents to concentration camps and extermination centers began. Identification of inmates in Nazi camps was performed in two ways: by special badges and by identification numbers.

The labeling of humanity: tattoo on child (see forearm) under Nazi rule

Petri dish, such as used in stem cell research, with label markings.

On September 4, 1942, Rumkowski spoke to the ghetto residents, using a PA system. Before he spoke, he began to cry. He pulled himself together, his grey hair ruffled in the wind, and said he had received a chilling demand from the SS: deliver 24,000 people to the train station for deportation to Chelmno, an extermination center, within the next 8 days. His request was this: to have the residents select for deportation their children, the old and the sick so that those able to work may be spared.

Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski addresses members of the Lodz ghetto, saying: "Give me your children."

Here are his remarks:

"A grievous blow has struck the ghetto. They are asking us to give up the best we possess--the children and the elderly. I was unworthy of having a child of my own, so I gave the best years of my life to children. I've lived and breathed with children, I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters! Hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers: Give me your children!

"I had a suspicion something was going to befall us. I anticipated 'something' and was always like a watchman: on guard to prevent it. But I was unsuccessful because I did not know what was threatening us. The taking of the sick from the hospitals caught me completely by surprise. And I give you the best proof there is of this: I had my own nearest and dearest among them and I could do nothing for them!

"I thought that would be the end of it, that after that, they'd leave us in peace, the peace for which I long so much, for which I've always worked, which has been my goal. But something else, it turned out, was destined for us. Such is the fate of the Jews: always more suffering and always worse suffering, especially in times of war.

"Yesterday afternoon, they gave me the order to send more than 20,000 Jews out of the ghetto, and if not--'We will do it!'. So the question became, 'Should we take it upon ourselves, do it ourselves, or leave it to others to do?'. Well, we--that is, I and my closest associates--thought first not about 'How many will perish?' but 'How many is it possible to save?' And we reached the conclusion that, however hard it would be for us, we should take the implementation of this order into our own hands. I must perform this difficult and bloody operation--I must cut off limbs in order to save the body itself. I must take children because, if not, others may be taken as well--God forbid."

He spoke a while longer, then he said this:

"I understand you, mothers; I see your tears, alright. I also feel what you feel in your hearts, you fathers who will have to go to work in the morning after your children have been taken from you, when just yesterday you were playing with your dear little ones. All this I know and feel. Since 4 o'clock yesterday, when I first found out about the order, I have been utterly broken. I share your pain. I suffer because of your anguish, and I don't know how I'll survive this - where I'll find the strength to do so.

"I must tell you a secret: they requested 24,000 victims, 3000 a day for eight days. I succeeded in reducing the number to 20,000, but only on the condition that these be children under the age of 10. Children 10 and older are safe! Since the children and the aged together equals only some 13,000 souls, the gap will have to be filled with the sick.

"I can barely speak. I am exhausted; I only want to tell you what I am asking of you: Help me carry out this action! I am trembling. I am afraid that others, God forbid, will do it themselves .

"A broken Jew stands before you. Do not envy me. This is the most difficult of all orders I have ever had to carry out at any time. I reach out to you with my broken, trembling hands and beg: Give into my hands the victims! So that we can avoid having further victims, and a population of 100,000 Jews can be preserved! So, they promised me: If we deliver our victims by ourselves, there will be peace!"

Then Rumkowski summed it all up:

"But put yourself in my place, think logically, and you'll reach the conclusion that I cannot proceed any other way. The part that can be saved is much larger than the part that must be given away!" (Give me your children!, 2002)

Notice that Rumkowski makes an appeal to sacrifice human beings based on number: the amount saved versus the amount sacrificed, plus age: those under 10 years old. It is a perversion of humanity that advocates for whatever reason the killing of human beings based on a numerical benefit ratio or on age, whether that age be an adult, a child or an embryonic life.

A statue outside Lidice, Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic, in memoriam to the children who died at the nearby Chelmo, Poland, extermination center, an old brick mansion, sharing the same fate as those from the Lodz ghetto (The Massacre at Lidice, 2010 and Chelmno Death Camp, 2010).

The children the parents gave up were executed. It is unclear if the parents knew of the fate that awaited their children at Chelmno, but words like "perish" and "sacrifice to the altar," seem to indicate at least Rumkowski knew. Rumkowski and his family were eventually deported and killed in Auschwitz. When the Soviets liberated the Lodz ghetto on January 19, 1945, out of the 230,000 Jewish residents, only 877 remained (The Lodz Ghetto, 2010).

If you concede that the human embryo is a stage of development of the same human being that will become a mature adult, are we not being asked to do the same thing that Rumkowski requested, that is, to give up our youngest children to save others--and is this not blatantly immoral?

Are not advocates of embryonic stem cell research asking us to sacrifice human life to save human life when they say, like Harvard researcher Melton that "The reality of the suffering of those individuals far outweighs the potential of blastocysts," or like ethicist Peters when he says that: "the blastocyst outside the mother’s body possesses no innate quality of human dignity. It does not stand up on its own and demand we treat it with moral protectability. Those who do stand up and provide us with an opportunity to love and to impart dignity are suffering people, whose lives could come to fuller flower with regenerative therapy."

Are not researchers complicit in a belief that the born are the "master race" while the unborn are their slaves? How is a group of people or a society that accepts this any better than the society that sent children to the extermination centers or the group of people that allowed this? Are not the institutions of higher learning, the research centers and the corporations that support experimentation on human embryonic stem cells identical to the German medical doctors and the extermination centers under the SS? Are not the rooms of Petri dishes where concentrations of human stem cells live the same as the infamous Nazi concentration camps?

If they are not the same, then how are they not the same? Are they not transferred from camp to camp, Petri dish to Petri dish? Is it not that the inmates today are simply younger, namely, just starting to live? Are they not all being sent to their death? And is their youth not even a greater condemnation and that they can not speak? Tell me, how are they different? Is it that they are just "potential life?" If so, then why does it take medical instruments to stop this potentiality, to stop their spontaneous development into maturity?

Or is the argument that this type of medical experimentation is acceptable because those being subject to experimentation do not suffer, nor do their relatives, as did those in German under the Nazi? Then, if suffering is the criteria for measuring evil acts, it should be acceptable to put an innocent person to death under anesthesia, say a person who is homeless and has no relatives, so that his heart could be harvested to save another's life.

Or maybe its OK to destroy embryonic life if that embryo is a clone and clones don't count. If that is a case, identical twins are clones and if it is permissible in the minds of researchers to destroy clones, then why not allow one identical twin to kill the other, being a mere clone? Do these researchers who advocate clone killing condemn Dr. Mengele, who performed the same act, albeit on older clonal children?

Or is it different for embryos just because these humans are so small, barely visible, even under a microscope and for that reason they do not matter. But are we not all living at the microscopic level? Does not cancer matter at the microscopic level? Does its size make it any less real, any less lethal? The code that spells out who were are operates at the microscopic level in all of us from conception to death. And it is the same code for the same individual for a lifetime. It does not change. It is who we are. That is what makes us matter and creates our identity regardless of size.

Killing an embryo eliminates that unique human identity forever.

And lastly, who is to say that the researcher, who decides to harvest stem cells from an embryo to save lives, when he pipettes the nucleus from the embryo--who is to say he or she is not destroying the life of a future researcher who could have found the cure for this or that disease?

Human life is sacred at any level. We all start at that level, the embryonic level, each and every one of us. Human embryos deserve protection from harm. Since when do only the people who can "stand up" on their own, count as people worthy of protection? What Peters is saying is that, in short, it is O.K. to destroy an embryo because it can not defend itself and because medical experiments involving its destruction have the potential of curing people. That is, the most vulnerable do not count. Are not researchers, such as Melton, asking us to kill our own because the hope of relieving suffering "outweighs" another's life?

This is against all that America has historically stood for, especially in the realms of civil rights, discrimination and equality. What this hedging demonstrates is that money or one’s personal or professional objectives can warp one’s world view.

An argument that provides a final solution by making an appeal to what is best for society, as opposed to what is best for the individual, ends up, indeed, the "final solution." When the individual is not the supreme unit, but instead people collectively, chaos rules, for in the end, no one is protected except those in control. This is tyranny, for then those in control are the ones who decide when human life begins--and ends.

Epilog Following the writing of this article, I learned that on August 3, 2005 Dr. James Dobson on his radio program "Focus on the Family" made a similar comparison. He said:

dddd

Dr. James Dobson

You know, the thing that means so much to me here on this issue [embryonic stem cell research] is that people talk about the potential for good that can come from destroying these little embryos and how we might be able to solve the problem of juvenile diabetes. There's no indication yet that they're gonna do that, but people say that, or spinal cord injuries or such things. But I have to ask this question: In World War II, the Nazis experimented on human beings in horrible ways in the concentration camps, and I imagine, if you wanted to take the time to read about it, there would have been some discoveries there that benefited mankind. You know, if you take a utilitarian approach, that if something results in good, then it is good. But that's obviously not true. We condemn what the Nazis did because there are some things that we always could do but we haven't done, because science always has to be guided by ethics and by morality. And you remove ethics and morality, and you get what happened in Nazi Germany (Dobson likened embryonic stem cell research to Nazi experiments, 2005).

Dobson was criticized by various groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, for making this comparison, saying he should apologize. However, Carrie Gordon Earll, Focus on the Family Action senior bioethics analyst, said the analogy comparing the Nazi human experiments conducted during World War II and today's embryonic stem-cell research is "historically and ethically accurate and appropriate."

"If any apologies are due," she explained, "it's the advocates of destructive research using embryonic humans who should be apologizing to their fellow members of the human family. It is never morally or ethically acceptable to intentionally destroy one human in the hopes of saving another--regardless of the age and location of the human to be sacrificed for research (Stanek, 2005)."

Part III will explore what can be done to liberate the embryo.

Citations:

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"Give us your children," medical scientists ask

What does it mean to be human? How important is the individual?

The fate of stem cell research andabortion hangs on the answers

1.

In the East Room of the White House on March 9, 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama signs an executive order and presidential memorandum clearing the way for federal funding of stem cell research.

A holding pipette at left positions an egg, while another pipette pierces its skin, extracting the stem cells inside.

Peter Singer

Patrick Lee

2.

Some Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers and staff from HSCI co-director Doug Melton's lab gather in their lunchroom to watch and celebrate as President Obama signs an executive order that overturned President Bush’s ban on stem cell funding. Melton is at right.

Thomas P. Zwaka

Dr. Robert Lanza

3.

Victim of a Nazi medical experi-ment is immersed in icy water at the Dachau concentration camp. SS doctor Sigmund Rascher oversees the experiment. Germany, 1942.

Dr. Josef Mengele

Renate and Rene Guttmann were subjected to injection and x-ray experiments by Josef Mengele. Courtesy of USHMM

4.

Dan Ruby

Sitting at a table (described as her "office") at her parent's home in Peyton, Colorado, 21-year-old law student Kristi Burton (now Brown) helped spearhead a movement to amend Colorado's state constitution that would have granted the status of a person to embryonic life.

Douglas Melton, co-director of Harvard Stem Cell Institute

Cryopreservation of embryos, which are frozen at -196C in liquid nitrogen.

5.

The labeling of humanity: tattoo on child (see forearm) under Nazi rule

Petri dish, such as used in stem cell research, with label markings.

Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski addresses members of the Lodz ghetto, saying: "Give me your children."

A statue outside Lidice, Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic, in memoriam to the children who died at the nearby Chelmo, Poland, extermination center, an old brick mansion, sharing the same fate as those from the Lodz ghetto (The Massacre at Lidice, 2010 and Chelmno Death Camp, 2010).

Dr. James Dobson

What does it mean to be human?
How important is the individual?

The fate of stem cell research and
abortion hangs on the answers