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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Bush's bioethics czar Leon Kass wants to criminalize lifesaving medical research as violating the natural order of things. Would he have opposed wiping out smallpox?
Jun 18, 2002 | In August, President George W. Bush appointed Leon Kass to head his Council on Bioethics, which is set to tackle such hot-button issues as stem-cell research, cloning, human genetics and longevity. The selection of Kass, a University of Chicago philosopher, is not good news for those who are sick from or dying of a disease that might be cured with embryonic stem-cell therapy. Kass, who believes that it may not be natural for humans to live so long in the first place, opposes the treatment, and in his current post he is prepared to criminalize the most important research of the century.
Scientists around the world are virtually unanimous in their belief that cloning human beings is a bad idea. The kinks need to be thoroughly worked out -- with animal research -- before human cloning can even be contemplated. It took almost 300 attempts to clone Dolly the sheep, and the failures were sad and unpredictable. Researchers, uninterested in repeating those failures with higher stakes, tend to agree, therefore, that doctors should not by allowed to implant cloned human blastocysts for the purpose of creating pregnancies.
In other words, scientists -- being rational people -- would prevent human cloning by corking up the essential bottleneck: pregnancy. This is why they have worked out protocols designed explicitly to prevent the implantation of a blastocyst into a womb.
But these protocols are not good enough for Kass, who maintains that we must quash any science, regardless of its utility or application, that might lead to human cloning. He is particularly worried about a procedure called nuclear transfer, an essential technique in both reproductive and therapeutic cloning. In this procedure the DNA is removed from an egg, and the DNA of the donor is substituted. The egg cell divides, creating a small clump of identical stem cells that could be used therapeutically to cure diseases as diverse as cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's and diabetes, among others.
Kass is worried that we won't be able to control these blastocysts once they're created. And he is right; the procedure could be performed by any qualified technician. But this is a free country, which means we don't ban something that isn't inherently bad merely because it might lead to something bad. This concept is at the heart of the Ninth Amendment. For instance, Americans should not run over people with their cars, so we passed a law against it. But even though it is simple to run people over and no one can prevent it, we still let people drive. And we still arrest them when they run people over.
Kass is suggesting that we condemn hundreds of millions of people to misery, suffering and early death in order to prevent something -- human cloning -- entirely unrelated to their circumstances. And yet no creditable scientist is proposing to clone a human. In fact, researchers are furious with the handful of renegade scientists who are trying to clone humans; it taints their own honest efforts.
The truly odd thing about Kass' stance is that nuclear transfer -- the demon that scares him the most -- is the least morally challenging technique for developing stem cells. Nuclear transfer does not involve the creation of new humans; it merely amplifies a patient's own tissue. We've been creating skin cultures for burn patients for years using techniques that are very similar to stem-cell culturing. It takes tortured logic to ban this whole field of medicine simply because somebody might do something bad with it.
Kass makes an interesting and seemingly hypocritical delineation in this debate: He claims to have no problem if medical research uses embryos left over from fertility clinics. But researchers know that stem cells derived from a foreign blastocyst will provoke an immune reaction, as will any foreign DNA. And, unlike nuclear transfer, an actual fertilized blastocyst is killed in the process. If there were any slippery slope to consider, it would probably involve these newly minted humans -- where parental genes have been mixed -- not just some cells cloned from one patient.
While cloned cells are merely an amplification of a patient's own tissue, a fertilized embryo is a potentially novel human. Kass seems to have it backward, wanting to ban experiments with a patient's own tissue, but condoning experiments on fertilized embryos.
