PZ Myers. 2005 May 20. Who's got the stem cells? Not us.. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/whos_got_the_stem_cells_not_us/>. Accessed 2008 Nov 20.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Friday, May 20, 2005
Who's got the stem cells? Not us.
The new breakthrough in cloning from South Korea is terrific news, but in many ways it's not at all surprising. Cloning by transplanting somatic cells into enucleated ova has been around for decades—we all knew that all it would take to get it done in humans was persistence and meticulous diligence and practice, practice, practice. This is not to belittle the accomplishment of Hwang's team, who have done an amazing job, but to point out what must be the frustration of being a reproductive biologist in GW Bush's America.
Carl Zimmer discusses the ironies involved:
Leonard Krishtalka, the director of the Kansas University Natural History Museum, was quoted pointing out how Kansas is raising $500 million to foster a bioscience and biotech industry in the state. It was ironic, he said, that the state's board of education was simultaneously "trying to remove and water down the basic fundamental concept of evolution that underlies all of biology."
Case in point: try to imagine a stem cell therapy company deciding where to set up shop. I doubt they'd be excited about a state that doesn't make sure their high school students understood mutations, natural selection, the origin of species, the fossil record, and all the other elements of evolutionary biology--that thinks it's fine just to claim that the broken sugar gene in our genome was just stuck there for reasons unknown by some mysterious designer.
Everything in biology is connected. You don't get to pick and choose which piece you should 'believe' in, and which pieces to reject, on anything other than the evidence. When the Kansas school board says they refuse to accept the central principles of biology, they don't get to turn around and say, "we'd like the benefits of cutting edge biomedical technology, please." When you cut down the tree, you don't get the apples.
And oh, the possible benefits! The South Korean cell lines have interesting sources, as a Science news article describes:
Nine of the 11 cell lines are derived from people, ranging in age from 10 to 56, who have suffered spinal cord injuries. The team has begun to test some of the lines in animal models of spinal cord injury, but Hwang cautions that they remain years away from transplanting the cells into people. "We have to be overconvinced" that the cells are safe, he says.
Another line is derived from a 2-year-old boy who has congenital hypogammaglobulonemia, a genetic immune deficiency. In theory, scientists could correct the genetic defect in the stem cells and then reinject them into the boy. Indeed, Jaenisch, Daley, and their colleagues have used such a strategy to treat mice with a similar genetic defect. Nevertheless, Hwang stresses that the boy's parents and the spinal cord patients were explicitly told that the team's research was unlikely to help them directly--even though the informed consent form used was, by Korean law, mandated to suggest such a possibility.
Although also unlikely to be employed for treatment, another ES cell line, derived from a 6-year-old type 1 diabetes patient, should interest scientists. "The possibility of being able to study disease in a culture dish is very exciting," says Douglas Melton of Harvard University, who has recently received permission from the school's ethics committee to derive ES cells from diabetes patients. "If we could make T cells and β cells in a dish--we're not there yet, but we're getting closer--then we could compare the diabetic cells to wild-type cells and ask what goes wrong," he explains. "For the first time we will have a chance to study the root causes of the disease."
Do you know anyone with diabetes? How do you think doctors will ever come up with a cure? These are the tools biomedical researchers need.
Of course, there will always be ethical issues. This isn't trivial stuff, and it isn't easy. Here's one problem that will have the religious right screaming (and troubles me a bit, too).
One important factor in his team's success, Hwang says, was the use of freshly harvested oocytes from fertile women instead of ones left over from fertility treatments. The age of donors may also be key. Whereas oocytes from women in their 30s yielded on average one ES cell line for every 30 tries, those from younger donors yielded one line for every 13 tries. In nine cases, it took only a single donation of oocytes from a woman to produce a new line. (Each donation yields about 10 oocytes.)
The religious right will freak out because of goofy ideas about the sacredness of eggs, but I don't like it because it is more incentive to take advantage of young women, although at least the National Academies discourage payment for oocytes. The thing is, I think the way to get over this ethical hurdle is to allow scientists to do the research and figure out how to improve success rates, minimize oocyte use, and streamline the whole process. Burying our heads in dogma does not solve any problems.
Vogel G (2005) Korean Team Speeds Up Creation Of Cloned Human Stem Cells. Science 308(5725):1096-1097.
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You don't get to pick and choose which piece you should 'believe' in, and which pieces to reject,
But they're so good at picking and choosing from their own Bible, playing a la carte Christianity, that it's only natural they'd do the same with science. -
Let's not forget that it's not only the Koreans making breakthroughs in this area - a British team have been doing so too (http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/story/0,12976,1488685,00.html).
#: Posted by on 05/20 at 09:58 AM
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The religious right will freak out because of goofy ideas about the sacredness of eggs, but I don't like it because it is more incentive to take advantage of young women...
What? Will fathers really be dragging their teenage daughters off the street asking for payment for their eggs?
You could just as well say that the option for young men to donate to sperm banks is more incentive to take advantage of them.
I wouldn't discount the altruistic feelings on the part of women who may be willing to part with some of their eggs either.#: Posted by on 05/20 at 10:03 AM -
I have been a fan of Pharyngula for a year and I think this is its most important post. It clearly shows the dilemma of teaching Creationism while striving to not to be left behind in biotechnology and medicine. America should not fear low-paid Indian biologists "stealing" their jobs, but Korean scientists "stealing" their future industries. BTW, South Korea is a Christian country.
In a side comment, I think one of the reasons America is leading and has almost monopolized the world fertility industry is because - contrary to the rest of the world - it is done on a commercial basis, and donors are paid according to market rate. PZ, no one is taking advantage of young women. Well, that is for another argument. The post is very important, it shows that Creationism is not just incredible & absurd, but it harms American national interest.#: Posted by on 05/20 at 10:12 AM -
There's a hopeful side issue here.
The brainless, vicious anti-evolution/anti-science/anti-education/anti-freedom types can take over the education syste (and government, and whatever else they can win) in Kansas if they like, and if Kansans let them. They can do the same in Florida, or Texas, or any state in the U.S.
But they can't do it in Kansas and Florida and Texas AND South Korea. Even if the whole of the United States is taken over by reactionary christianity, even if they kill every one of our American ideals and we become a third-rate country of lying theocrats and frightened, ignorant, obedient peasants, they can't do it everywhere.
What's happening here in the U.S. heartland is personally disturbing to us here in the U.S. But I imagine those of us who live in England are merely bemused by it. Those of us in Australia chuckle at the silliness of it all. And those of us in South Korea are getting on with this exciting work.
It's kinda like having a big, ugly rat in your house (apologies to the genus Rattus, and all rat fans). It seems especially scary or disgusting or whatever ... but only because it's close. The rat next door isn't as scary, and the rat in your auntie's house halfway around the world is little more than a funny story.
Okay, so we have rats in Kansas.
It's definitely worth opposing them in Kansas, and elsewhere here in the U.S., to try to minimize the amount of needless misery, ignorance and death they WILL cause our own geographic/national compatriots. But elsewhere in the world – in South Korea, for instance – the rats have, once again, lost a good bit of ground.
I guess I like to think of it this way: Most of us who visit Pharyngula carry dual citizenship. We’re citizens of whatever countries we were born into, but we’re also citizens of the Nation of Mind.
And in THAT country, our truest homeland, good stuff continues to happen. -
Young men donating sperm aren't facing invasive and disruptive hormonal treatments, followed by a rather painful surgery.
I'm not worried about fathers selling off their daughters' eggs. It's more subtle than that. Some women are getting paid $10,000 for the right to harvest their eggs, and the concern is that this kind of economic coercion is something that could be misused. I think altruistic donations are to be commended, but the stuff women have to go through to extract a set of eggs is fairly intense, and that would be very altruistic of them.
It's just like working in a strip club. It's a tempting opportunity for healthy young ladies, and it's something we shouldn't arbitrarily close off, but we also have to be aware that these things also have other costs...and it definitely isn't a productive career move. -
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/05/20/bush.stem.cells/
Friday, May 20, 2005 Posted: 11:43 AM EDT (1543 GMT)
(CNN) -- President Bush on Friday threatened to veto a bill expanding public funding for embryonic stem cell research that could make it to his desk by early next week.
"I made [it] very clear to the Congress that the use of federal money, taxpayers' money, to promote science which destroys life in order to save life, I'm against that," Bush told reporters. "Therefore if the bill does that, I will veto it."
...
#: Posted by on 05/20 at 10:40 AM -
I'm a bit fuzzy on what's possible here, but I remember reading recently that researchers were hoping to create mice with brains made entirely out of human neurons.
Is it possible mice, or sheep or something, could eventually be tinkered with to cause them to produce human egg cells?
So that the question of coercing young women could be bypassed in only a few years?
(Heh. Just a catty side-thought: In the same way the Catholic Church is denying communion, etc., to politicians who favor abortion rights, maybe it's only right that all the fruits of this type of medical research should be denied to all politicians and fundamentalist religious activists who oppose it ... and maybe even their family members. I can already hear the screams.
)
- See my comment on Santorum. Change all instances of "Rick Santorum" to "GW Bush". It's still true.
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Hank, yes...maybe not just a few years, but eventually. Eggs are just another cell type, and ovaries are just another organ. Same for sperm and testes.
Of course, the fun part about bioethics is that if we let science proceed to make one problem irrelevant, it will have succeeded in generating whole new ethical issues that we hadn't even considered.
The fundamentalists will really freak out when we can take a gay man's skin cell, insert it into an enucleated oocyte, and culture it up into an ovary in a dish, and extract eggs from it that could then be fertilized by the man's partner. Similarly, there may be a receptive market for lab grown lesbian testes. -
Egg donation is a scary procedure. I looked into it after the Nth ad in the campus paper promised untold gazillions to young women with high SAT scores: you shoot yourself full of hormones for a month, the harvest itself is painful and invasive, there's a nontrivial risk of infertility involved.
But most women aren't getting paid $10,000 for their eggs. A typical payment is on the order of $1,500-$3,000 - which, considering how much time the donor has to spend on clinic visits, getting sick from the hormones and missing work, etc., isn't that far beyond expenses. Larger payments seem to come from creepy eugenicists.
The real question is, will people believe that intelligence, musical and athletic ability, etc., can be inherited through mitochondrial DNA? Because without such beliefs I don't think we'll see the kind of high-end market for nonnucleated oocytes that we have for whole eggs. -
Yeah, well, I have Type 1 diabetes (acquired, not inherited), and I've thought about this -- for about 90 seconds.
I spent longer thinking about when life begins, and I finally decided that the arguments (which I first heard about in Catholic school) based on the magic moment (fertilization, blastomere, ability to survive outside the womb) would never be resolvable.
Being, as I think, a logical and scientificallly oriented person, I asked myself, since there is much less argument about when life ends, is there a purely materialistic metric that, working backward, gives origin of life?
There is. Cell division.
Working backward, the answer is not very comfortable for researches like Professor Myer or Type 1 diabetics.
But there you go.
Anyhow, I've made up my mind. If they come up with a stem-cell treatment for diabetes, I won't be using it.#: Posted by on 05/20 at 11:35 AM -
I spent longer thinking about when life begins, and I finally decided that the arguments (which I first heard about in Catholic school) based on the magic moment (fertilization, blastomere, ability to survive outside the womb) would never be resolvable.
Being, as I think, a logical and scientificallly oriented person, I asked myself, since there is much less argument about when life ends, is there a purely materialistic metric that, working backward, gives origin of life?
There is. Cell division.
If you think life is sacred, then I presume you don't eat meat or vegetables, as these are derived from living things. Maybe you hold a solemn ceremony every time you clip your finger nails or trim your hair.
Hum a few bars of "every sperm is sacred" (from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life) and think about it some more.#: Posted by on 05/20 at 12:53 PM -
since there is much less argument about when life ends
Eh?! Did you somehow manage to miss: the centuries of shifting definitions as scientific measurements and medical interventions improved; the ongoing arguments about right to life versus right to die (both invoking dignity as a reason as well as viability); the continuing coma and organ donation controversies (issues of artificial respiration etc and how dead is brain dead just as much as any religious considerations); and the recent Terri Schiavo farce.#: Posted by on 05/20 at 01:13 PM -
No, I didn't miss 'em. But there's pretty general agreement about flatlining. I'd bet around 90% of Americans are comfortable with that.
There may be some play in there, and even after flatlining there will be some cell division for a few minutes. After that, nada. So that's where I started -- just before that last cell division.
If there's a bright line somewhere between there and the first division after formation of the zygote, you tell me where it is.
byzanteen is a good example of the kind of person who you cannot have a discussion about this question with. I didn't say anything about life being sacred. I specifically said I was looking for a materialist metric. Maybe I failed. But I didn't fail because I sneaked sacredness in.#: Posted by on 05/20 at 01:30 PM -
Uh, what? Cell division is the marker for life? That doesn't make any sense at all.
You do realize, I presume, that mitosis is only one part of a cell's metabolic activity, and many cells shut it off completely -- including the neurons of your brain, which made one last terminal division sometime during your fetal or neonatal life, and never divide again.
The first divisions after fertilization also seem to be largely proliferative, without much differentiation going on. You can divide the zygote in two at the first division, for instance, and it will go on to form twins. One life or two? -
"If there's a bright line somewhere between there and the first division after formation of the zygote, you tell me where it is."
It can be absolutely certain that the bright line is much much further along than stage used for this recerch. For one thing a few non differentiated cells has not the ability of the mass of neurons that is the human brain.#: Posted by on 05/20 at 02:00 PM -
uh... why cell division, in particular? it doesn't seem to me that spermatozoa and oocytes are any less materialistically significant, or any less alive, than cells capable of dividing.
and why do you feel there's that much less debate about when life ends? i've been dabbling in the euthanasia/suicide argument, and it gets pretty damn confusing at times.
and what role, if any, does the concept of personhood ("humanity") play in your line of thinking? after all, all kinds of living things undergo cell division, yet we feel no compunction about killing most of them. if cell division was the only criterion you used, you'd have to live as a Jainist, i suppose.#: Posted by on 05/20 at 02:20 PM -
You're not taking materialism far enough, though, Harry. You are asking the question "when does life begin", as if there were some (in your exact words) "bright line" demarcating the "living" states of a system from its "nonliving" states. But there is no such line.
Your "logically and scientifically oriented" inquiry also has a major flaw - the sperm and egg came about through cell division too. You now have to add epicycles to your metric ("cell division starting from a fertilized zygote" or some such thing), and then you somehow have to justify those additions, and then it begins to seem even more that you knew the answer you would reach before you began the inquiry.
Scientific facts can help us decide things like where to draw a moral line, but morals aren't just there to be seen by coming up with something - it's not that easy! -
Life doesn't switch on at some arbitrary time during gestation; every individual has budded as part of one continuous living process reaching back to the first replicating cell.
After a little googling I found the Sagan essay on abortion where I first read that point of view.
It happens to be an interesting look at what sorts of reasoning have been applied to making judgements about when life begins. -
I hardly expected to persuade many people, but on the other hand I am unimpressed by the counterarguments offered here (and elsewhere I've floated this). Suit yourself.
Either human individuals exist or they don't. I think they do.
They are either immortal or they die. I think we die.
How do we know we are dead? I think the polls after the Schiavo situation back me up on when you're dead. There's not much controversy, in the US, about that, except maybe among Christian Scientists. I'm not trying to accommodate them. I was going for the rationalists.
If there's a biological process (aside from cell division) that has ceased but previously was working, you tell me how to recognize it and when it started.
I'm just an amateur, but I think the difference between NO cells dividing any longer and SOME cells no longer dividing in a particular organ is pretty significant.
To answer some specific comments. Christopher, ability to do anything with the dividing cells is not part of my reasoning. That's your bright line. It's qualitative, though. I'm looking for quantitative.
The question 'one life or two' seems meaningless in this context, since the question is 'life' or 'not life.'
Again, I'm not asking what the function of the divisions is, whether they are 'merely proliferative' or differentiating. That seems to be a form of the sentience argument.
If you choose sentience, though, you get into all sorts of problems at the other end. I was looking for something that you can see all through periods we recognize as 'life' and don't see before or after.
Maybe there is no such thing. I considered ATP oxidation, too, but I can't find any difference, temporally, between that and cell division, and I cannot think of anything else.
Nomen, sperm may be alive but they are incapable, by themselves, of forming an individual. One part of my scheme that is not perfectly clear is the status of a frozen embryo. No cell division there, but there's potentia.
What role does 'personhood' play? None, if you mean 'personality.' I'd like to see a definition that avoids any opening for bumping off the retarded, admitting that, maybe , a purely materialistic approach might not give me that.
I'm pleased to say, mine seems not to go there. I'd have liked it to give me a replacement for 73 units of insulin, too, but I didn't get that. Well, the Universe doesn't give a damn about me, does it?
That we care about humans is solipsitic, I guess, but there you are. I eat, therefore I am; and I am, therefore I eat. From a Jainist prespective, it's limited and arbitrary. So be it. If we don't count for something to ourselves, who else is there to count for?#: Posted by on 05/20 at 05:15 PM -
I'm with Pete (#20). There is no bright line. Life is messy.
#: Posted by on 05/20 at 05:24 PM
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"If there's a biological process (aside from cell division) that has ceased but previously was working, you tell me how to recognize it and when it started."
--Several of us have already told you. It started almost 4.5 billion years ago and hasn't stopped yet, and is ongoing in each one of us.
My suspicion is that you have already made up your mind that it's wrong to destroy a fertilized zygote, and to buttress this conviction you have found a property that seems to draw the line where you want it. (We all do this with our moral intuitions, by the way - so I'm not singling you out. We need other people with different views to point out to us when we're doing this.) You didn't respond to my comment but I'll restate it: your "cell division" metric does not work because sperm and eggs themselves are cells that were produced through cell division - so the process didn't begin with the egg, it began...well, a long time ago.
But this isn't the main objection I have. As I have already said, the entire form of your argument gets off on the wrong foot from the beginning. The form of it is this: you are looking for X, where X is an objectively observable, materialistic property of a system that will tell you, upon a bit of reflection, whether or not it is all right to destroy it. What I am saying is not so much that your choice of X is wrong, but that it's misguided to go looking for such an X in the first place. The only thing that can decide this is a larger discussion of values, morals, ethics, etc., that can be informed by science but not precisely dictated by science. -
What role does 'personhood' play? None, if you mean 'personality.' I'd like to see a definition that avoids any opening for bumping off the retarded, admitting that, maybe , a purely materialistic approach might not give me that.
Are you saying that retarded people have no personalities...?#: Posted by on 05/20 at 06:33 PM -
fertilized ova are alive, but they too are unable, by themselves, to form a human individual. there's rather a lot that needs to be done to get from there to here, as i'm sure our host could explain.
i think the Terri Schiavo case is an excellent example of what "personhood" might mean, and particularly of why it's an important concept in the debate over what "death" might mean. her cells had surely not ceased dividing (well, except for the lines you would expect to have ceased dividing long ago -- including, as has been remarked, those that made up her brain), yet there was debate over whether or not she was "dead".
note that i did not say there was reasonable debate. i think the naysayers in that case had all the credibility, and all the evidentiary support, as well as all the reasoned argument, of young-earth creationists. but there was debate, and that tells me the notion of "personhood" does indeed matter, for what else could the debate have been about? it matters more than any purely biological process; it must, because Terri possessed almost every biological process you and i do, and that "almost" is only there to hedge because i'm not a biologist or a doctor. nonetheless, she was dead.
so personhood is important. but it is not, to the best of my knowledge, tied to cell division, and i see no way to so tie it -- hence, i still do not see why you think cell division is of any concern here.
even more to the point, if spermatozoa and unfertilized eggs are alive, then cell division cannot matter to the status of being "alive". you yourself just admitted they are alive. the only way they can divide is purely in potentia, but treating potential cell division as though it were actual capability is plainly unreasonable. the same goes for confusing any potentiality for the real thing, of course.
and if we're going to blatantly up and consider our own species more important than any other species whose cells also divide, without giving any further reason for this assumption, then i believe we'll be swallowing a much larger camel than the mere gnat of whether or not cell division matters at all. there are some good ways to defend speciesism and anthropocentrism, but the sort of philosophical artillery you have to resort to then make anything single-celled quite irrelevant by comparison.#: Posted by on 05/20 at 06:51 PM -
Countless zygotes are destroyed as part of standard fertility strategies without a murmur of disapproval from all but a handful of the most marginal among anti-choice activists.
Every blastocyst has the potential to become autonomous life, or to be sacrificed in service to the rest of humanity for unlocking the secrets of health and longevity for subsequent generations, or to be spontaneously aborted before anybody ever knew it existed. Should our increasing technological sophistication require us to be more moral than nature? If every cell in our body is a potential clone, will we each become mass murderers through our failure to apply cloning technology? Is our moral culpability dependant on our capacity to affect change technologically?
It's a moral decision to not attempt to treat diabetes and ALS and MS by blocking some research avenues otherwise open to us. People have always died of horrible diseases, and spontaneous abortions have always outnumbered the intentional. For potential individuals to trump the hope for recovery among fully aware human beings makes no sense to me. -
Anyhow, I've made up my mind. If they come up with a stem-cell treatment for diabetes, I won't be using it.
Harry, you will not be helping anyone by condemning yourself to suffer diabetes. On the contrary.#: Posted by on 05/20 at 10:18 PM - Harry, for ethical purposes you can't base personhood on biological process. Morally, personhood is based on the concept of a rational being; hence, humans need to be protected, but not mice, even though both species are alive. Since a blastula doesn't even have a brain, it can't be a rational being when an ant, which does, is not. The fact that undifferentiated human cells divide shouldn't matter, because so do bacteria, which are clearly not rational beings.
- A minor note, by the way: please stop exalting American values. To everyone who knows about the United States' foreign policy record, American values include continually rape of Latin America, promoting fascism in the third world, and bombing countries that don't tow the line. Christian fanatics don't go against the United States' values, but against the United States' professed values.
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By golly, I had expected to have to defend my idea, but I had not expected that (I presume) evolutionists would question the existence of individuals. I'm flummoxed.
Patrick, people do.
Ken, I don't think 'increasing technical sophistication' requires us to be more moral than nature. But we'd better be for some reason. Nature is not moral.
Alon, where did I praise American values?
Well, if you can't base personhood on biological process, and life is messy and there aren't any materially determinable bright lines, then I guess you have to fall back on some variety of mysticism.#: Posted by on 05/21 at 04:19 AM -
I wasn't talking to you about American values, but to Hank Fox (reply #5). Sorry for the confusion.
You don't have to fall back on mysticism to determine personhood. You can comfortably base it on neurological processes, which is the only way you can justify killing bacteria and eating plants. -
Harry Eager says
Well, if you can't base personhood on biological process, and life is messy and there aren't any materially determinable bright lines, then I guess you have to fall back on some variety of mysticism.
No, you just do what you do in every other situation. You draw the line somewhere in between the extremes with the realization that the exact point is somewhat arbritrary because reality doesn't come in "bright lines".#: Posted by on 05/21 at 05:09 AM -
Harry none of the people here deny the existence of individuality/individuals. That argument only makes sense if they were arguing from your viewpoint. As it is, they are explaining why they think your viewpoint is wrong, and thus can't be expected to define individuality/individuals based upon your presumptions.
#: Posted by on 05/21 at 06:15 AM
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The complete lyrics:
http://www.lyricsdepot.com/monty-python/every-sperm-is-sacred.html
Every Sperm Is Sacred
Monty Python
DAD:
There are Jews in the world.
There are Buddhists.
There are Hindus and Mormons, and then
There are those that follow Mohammed, but
I've never been one of them.
I'm a Roman Catholic,
And have been since before I was born,
And the one thing they say about Catholics is:
They'll take you as soon as you're warm.
You don't have to be a six-footer.
You don't have to have a great brain.
You don't have to have any clothes on. You're
A Catholic the moment Dad came,
Because
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
CHILDREN:
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
GIRL:
Let the heathen spill theirs
On the dusty ground.
God shall make them pay for
Each sperm that can't be found.
CHILDREN:
Every sperm is wanted.
Every sperm is good.
Every sperm is needed
In your neighbourhood.
MUM:
Hindu, Taoist, Mormon,
Spill theirs just anywhere,
But God loves those who treat their
Semen with more care.
MEN:
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
WOMEN:
If a sperm is wasted,...
CHILDREN:
...God get quite irate.
PRIEST:
Every sperm is sacred.
BRIDE and GROOM:
Every sperm is good.
NANNIES:
Every sperm is needed...
CARDINALS:
...In your neighbourhood!
CHILDREN:
Every sperm is useful.
Every sperm is fine.
FUNERAL CORTEGE:
God needs everybody's.
MOURNER #1:
Mine!
MOURNER #2:
And mine!
CORPSE:
And mine!
NUN:
Let the Pagan spill theirs
O'er mountain, hill, and plain.
HOLY STATUES:
God shall strike them down for
Each sperm that's spilt in vain.
EVERYONE:
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is good.
Every sperm is needed
In your neighbourhood.
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite iraaaaaate!
#: Posted by on 05/21 at 08:11 AM -
Right Harry, nature is not moral, it's wasteful; massive stem cell research could never keep up with nature's profligate spontaneous abortions.
Technological sophistication adds to our moral responsibility to endeavor to eradicate disease and suffering. If at some time we acquire the capacity to artificially gestate every zygote to full term, no culture I'm aware of is prepared to provide for every theoretically potential person.
Why condemn the living to avoidable suffering? -
A question, a suggestion, and an observation.
Q:If a female donates the nucleus to the egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed, who is the father of that cell?
S: Perhaps researchers could address some of the ethical issues by investigating, with non-humans, the rate of spontaneous abortions of these types of cells. If the rate of spontaneous abortions of these cells was equal to or greater than the rate of normally-fertilized cells, then the ethical dilemma would certaily be diminished.
O:Kudos to the Koreans, but don't that just emphsize the diminution of our scientific prowess that President Bush wants to increase by threatening to veto any cloning bill, and that would increase even more if a handfull of zealots manage to change science teaching standards?#: Posted by on 05/21 at 12:51 PM -
In that example, the egg cell is a clone of the female donor, so genetically speaking the father would be the father of the donor.
I don't know that the spontaneous abortion rate is an issue. These are cells that are only grown in culture.
And yes, Bush is an idiot who is damaging the progress of science. -
Good, Harry. I think it would be neat to get every conservative Christian to sign a solemn vow that neither they nor their spouses nor children would ever allow themselves to benefit from any medical discoveries arising out of stem cell research.
(Just to be on the safe side, seeing as how there's nothing to this silly evolution business, they should also refuse any medicine or medical procedure which had been tested on animals first.)
Just out of curiosity, Harry, do you think Bush would refuse stem cell therapy at some point later in his life, if he discovered he had Parkinson's, or diabetes, or some such?
My own opinion is that he would. Further, if it wasn't available in this country, I'll bet he'd fly to Switzerland, or South Korea, or wherever he had to, to get the treatment. Considering that he'll be an ex-president, with slam-bang retirement benefits, it will probably be paid for by U.S. taxpayers, too.
Jeez, too bad all of us aren't so blessed.#: Posted by on 05/21 at 10:15 PM -
"Everything in biology is connected. You don't get to pick and choose which piece you should 'believe' in, and which pieces to reject, on anything other than the evidence"
That's an hilarious statement coming from someone who chooses not believe in the existence of evolved racial differences.#: Posted by on 05/21 at 10:46 PM -
In that example, the egg cell is a clone of the female donor, so genetically speaking the father would be the father of the donor.
Does it mean that it's going to produce offspring genetically equivalent to offspring produced out of sexual relations between the donor and her father? If so then this is going to cause inbreeding problems.
That's an hilarious statement coming from someone who chooses not believe in the existence of evolved racial differences.
Oh yeah, one of the centerpieces of biology is equivalent to a fringe viewpoint whose best way to propagate itself is presenting itself as oppressed. -
No, it's a clone. Its offspring would be approximately the same as if they had been the offspring of the donor. Her father would be the grandfather of those offspring.
#: Posted by on 05/22 at 03:27 AM
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Perhaps researchers could address some of the ethical issues by investigating, with non-humans, the rate of spontaneous abortions of these types of cells. If the rate of spontaneous abortions of these cells was equal to or greater than the rate of normally-fertilized cells, then the ethical dilemma would certaily be diminished.
Certainly not. 90% of those cute baby bunnies have to die to have a stable population. Nature is profligate in excess, and we - specially we evolutionists - do not derive moral conclusions from nature. Nature is indifferent, teaches nothing about human ethics.
Since this is an area where anybody is entitled to have an opinion, I venture to say that if women cries for a dead fertilized ovum, that zygote was a person. If a woman cries for a second-month aborted fetus, it was a person. If the same fetus is spontaneously or artifically aborted without the woman noticing it, it was not a person, it did not exist.#: Posted by on 05/22 at 04:57 AM -
You'd have to ask George, Hank.
I am appalled by the lack of serious response to my proposal.
Not that nobody is buying it. I expected that, because the conclusion is unwelcome to the general opinion here. OK. But where is the alternative materialist conception?
The closest we've got is the utilitarian argument. Utilitarian arguments are the weakest kind, and the one on offer is the weakest of the weak: It might help somebody.
And if, in the end, it doesn't, it was wrong?
This is an atheism-friendly site, right? Not only is no one else trying for a materialist concept, several posters have explicitly denied that a materialist (scientific, what word you will) approach can have any validity.
Think politically, folks. If that's right you've surrendered the game to the metaphysicians, and they are not your friends.
Let's present a real-world test: the Bantus espouse a non-materialist, unscientific view of natural history that says twins are accursed. (I don't know, or care, exactly why they think this; it is enough that they do.) So when twins are born, the set the live infants in front of a herd of cattle to be trampled.
Query: Which side of the non-bright line is this on? Give reasons. If you find this practice dubious, could you give a materialist/scientific argument against it? Or do you have to fall back on mysticism and religion (religion broadly defined)?#: Posted by on 05/22 at 07:15 PM -
i kindof hope this site is atheist-friendly, seeing as i've been a strong atheist all my adult life. but, frankly, the reason i for one am not proposing any alternatives to your idea is twofold:
(1), the ethical debate over personhood, life, killing, and so on, has been going on for centuries, and has produced enormous amounts of source material that would need to be gone over before we could even list all the bases we'd have to cover. trying to do that in the comments on this one blog post is not doable. but just as importantly:
(2), i still don't see that the option you'd like me to present alternatives to even makes any sense to begin with. i really do not understand your thinking, so i'd like to figure out how that goes before i try to replace it.
oh, and just as a quick aside: it's not that methodological materialism (or even philosophical materialism) is invalid, it's that your insistence on biological processes as being paramount is taking materialism further than most would claim it needs to go in this instance. as has been noted, you could use materialistic notions of neurological processes and/or cognitive abilities to (i believe) far better effect. you seem certain that cell division ought to be of supreme concern to a materialist in this matter; you haven't convinced me, however.#: Posted by on 05/22 at 07:59 PM -
Harry - my serious response has gone uncommented upon, which makes me think perhaps I shouldn't try again. Well, maybe one more time.
Your proposal is fatally flawed from the beginning because it seeks to use scientific criteria to determine a non-scientific (and not mystical, but moral) distinction. You have been somewhat vague about what exactly your proposal really is, so let me set out what I take it as in a more formal fashion. I will call your proposal H. It has a conclusion and three premises, viz.:
H: "(C): It is wrong to destroy a fertilized zygote, because (1) it is wrong to kill a living human, and (2) one can determine the difference between a member of the set of living humans and a non-member by whether cell division is occurring in the specimen, and (3) a zygote is a member of this set under this definition".
There are many things wrong with H. My main objection is that premise (1) is too inflexible. It seeks to establish a universal moral truth by relying on premise (2) to define the conditions under which it applies. I have stated before that premise (2) does not apply, because cell division has been constantly occurring in an unbroken chain since the very first cell. You have to add additional qualifications to your premise - e.g., "a morally relevant span of cell division is one that begins at each fertilization" - to get over this objection, but the qualifications you must add are precisely those which one would add to arrive at the naive position that it is simply wrong to destroy a zygote. In other words, your scheme H begs the question because it assumes the desired conclusion from the outset.
I still contend that you are mistakenly conmixing a superstitious or supernatural property, i.e., "LIFE", with your otherwise impeccable materialism. It's not that I think that mystical or religious properties must determine moral facts -- far from it, since I'm a positive atheist (I positively endorse the proposition "No deities exist"). I think, rather, that there are no moral facts. There is only behavior interpreted from a moral stance.
Of course, it helps us to be clear about all the facts (that is, the materialistic scientific facts) if we want to make the best possible moral decisions. But we can't find "moral facts" in nature. That is why your proposal is terminally naive. Moral decisions must be made in the moral sphere, taking into account such factors as people's wishes, desires, beliefs, principles, rights, and what we have come to know about the world through science. Your proposal H attempts to take a simple, in fact untenable, definition and use it to ground a universal moral truth. As N.Ns. has just said before me, the ethical problem of life and murder is millenia old and will not be skirted by a simple scheme like H, as much as we would wish it could be. -
ARgh. I correct myself from my most recent post: My own opinion is that he (Bush) would NOT refuse a stem-cell-derived medicine or therapy, at some point later in his life.
Pete, thank you. That was a very clear explanation. (And I wish I'd written it.) -
'people's wishes desires' etc. and 'science.'
Well, if you're a Bantu, wishes and desires are predicated on avoiding the bad juju of twins.
Being a positive atheist is not probative of anything.
So how do you justify not putting the twins in the path of the herd?
The only 'moral fact' I am presenting is that, yes, I do believe that we should not kill non-transgressive members of our own species. ('Transgressive' here is a dangerous word, though. Christians can, and have, used it to kill homosexuals.)
So when is the membership card issued? Until we can say, we cannot know whether the social moral code is in effect or not.
I don't think my proposal is the last word, only the first.
I'm just a poor redneck from the peckerwoods. I'm sure you sophisticates can come up with a better one.#: Posted by on 05/23 at 12:11 PM - Harry, PZ stated his opinion here that the position that "... human life is an absolute that can be defined entirely by material properties of the genome, that there can be such a thing as purely ‘human’ DNA vs. non-human DNA, is the worst kind of simplistically reductionist, dehumanizing thinking."
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plenty of people know, exactly, sometimes down to the second, when that "membership card" for humanity is issued. they scare me. personally, i have only a vague notion of when it happens; my own thinking is more down the lines of what qualifications a body has to pass before it can be issued. but please don't ask me for a checklist, because people who feel quite certain about having a good such scare me too. (i've got something of the sort, actually, but it's vague and subject to change.)
your twins question is interesting, but i've forgotten what it's got to do with the subject at hand. my answer to it would be based largely on my strong philosophical materialism.#: Posted by on 05/23 at 01:19 PM -
I give up. Uncle.
If you guys cannot distinguish between LIFE and a marker for an individual life, then your enemies are going to hand you your heads on a plate.
What twins had to do with the discussion was where the line between a human life worthy of protection and a humanlike life not worthy would fall.
If you cannot make it fall on the side of not setting out infants to be trampled by cows, you're in big trouble, politically.#: Posted by on 05/24 at 12:06 AM -
If you guys cannot distinguish between LIFE and a marker for an individual life, then your enemies are going to hand you your heads on a plate.
Who's "you guys"? I didn't argue about life in general but about individuals; my argument is just that for purposes of worthiness of protection you have to use neurology rather than biology. -
What's this, uncle Harry? You're trying to claim that the failure to objectively set an arbitrary black/white limit somewhere on a grey scale is a political failing? The inability to over-simplify and unfairly polarize a complex problem is "big trouble"?
Strangely enough, you're correct. You're right that it makes politics difficult. It's far easier to sell a simplistic message. It's just that the people who understand some of this complexity would rather direct their effort at educating the masses, rather than clinging to arbitrary unrealistic notions and appealing to the ignorance of the crowd. Reality-based politics is a harder path.
No matter what metric you choose for life, you will encounter grey scales. As soon as you decide on some cut-off point on any scale, someone will construct a moral dilemma involving a life that is just below the cut-off by combining it with their own contrived future projection of that life. The upshot is that there will always be a grey area where people will disagree (probably violently) about the definition. There is no solution to this problem achieved by moving your limit to one of two extremes. That would be impractical and unrealistic.
I suspect that you'd like someone here to define a metric and a cutoff, so that you can then contrive your own hypothetical projections. Sorry. Those arguments take too much time and achieve nothing. -
You need to contrive a metric for your purposes, not for mine.
If you don't you've lost.
You can then go back to the faculty lounge and scorn the common folk.
Enjoy.#: Posted by on 05/24 at 11:44 AM -
You want non-absolutists to sell an absolutist position to absolutists who already "know" where their bright line is?
The certainty you claim we need does not exist. The metric you propose is for stifling thought, discussion and discernment. People who need ironclad rules not only don't trust reason, they're impervious to it. -
I hope you have fun failing to come to grips with reality, Harry. All of life's decisions were meant to be absolutely black and white, weren't they?
Have anice"perfect" day. -
Harry,
Way back in post #16 you seem to imply that life ends when the brain stops functioning (assuming you mean flat EEG when you say flatlining). If brain death marks the end of life, why did you look for another marker. Maybe you should look for some level of brain activity to mark the beginning of life.
Using you criteria Henrietta Lacks is still alive. She will probably outlive us all. She may outlive humanity.
Look up HeLa.#: Posted by on 05/24 at 06:09 PM