BACKGROUND TO DEBATE OVER EMBRYONIC STEM CELL "RESEARCH"

In 1996 and every subsequent year Congress has banned the use of federal funds for (1) creating human embryos for research and (2) "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death." The ban was prompted by National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposals to fund morally objectionable experiments using human embryos.

The Human Embryo Research Panel, then advising NIH, while not moved by the public aversion to the proposals, was not insensitive to the public "yuck factor." And so, facing public and congressional opposition, NIH sounded a tactical retreat, advocating research in what at first glance may seem to be the less obviously repugnant field of human embryonic "stem cells."

Embryonic stem cells are not themselves 'human beings." They are fast-growing, undifferentiated cells which are capable of producing a wide variety of specialized cell types - - brain, muscle, blood, and liver, for example.

Why a moral objection to research involving such cells? Because to harvest or "isolate" embryonic stem cells one must destroy a living, growing human embryo. Making this already highly objectionable practice even worse is that many stem cells (such as those which produce new blood cells) can be extracted from an adult with no harm to the donor.

The Clinton-Gore Administration and certain members of Congress have been looking for ways to fund human embryonic stem cell research without violating the letter of the congressional ban. To this end, administration officials offered several inventive readings of the statutory language.

For example, Health and Human Services (HHS) General Counsel Harriet Rabb obliged with a general counsel's opinion conveniently finding that the ban does not even apply to such research. A human embryo outside a womb, she submits, is not an " organism" unless it is proved that the embryo would have become a "human being" if implanted in a womb.

No matter that this claim contradicts every standard embryology text: a new human life comes into being once fertilization occurs. Even at that one-celled stage, a human being is properly called a human embryo. Plant a human embryo in a womb and what else could it possibly become, other than a human fetus, infant, toddler, teen?

Humans don't transmogrify into rock, scissors, or paper. The only way to stop a human embryo from becoming a human fetus and then infant is to deprive him or her of the protective environment of the womb, deny nourishment, or otherwise destroy that embryo.

NIH Director Harold Varmus offered an equally implausible argument for excluding embryonic stem cell research from the present ban: no human being is harmed by the research because a human being is "an entire mature organism." By this standard, we could exclude infants and teenagers (and, some would add, young males into their late 20s).

Recent studies in brain imaging have proven what parents have long suspected: the brains of teens and young adults process information differently from those of "grown-ups." That " mature organism" standard is quite a slippery slope. Who knows where it could end?

The Clinton-Gore Administration also argue that embryos can be killed with private funds and their stem cells transferred to federally funded researchers without doing violence to the law. This ignores the plain statutory language, which bans funds not simply for the act of killing an embryo, but for any part of a research project in which one or more embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death. The argument offends fundamental concepts of moral and legal culpability.

It has also been suggested that research embryos could be pre-programmed with a lethal genetic defect, designed to make them self-destruct before a certain stage of development. Researchers could claim they have a right to do lethal experiments on such embryos because the embryos were not intended to survive long enough to become what the researchers see as "human beings."

Compare this idea to the conduct of doctors involved in the infamous Tuskegee experiments in which poor black men with syphilis were not told of their condition or treated for it in order that the natural progression of the disease might be tracked. Bad enough that they callously watched patients suffer and die without treating them. But even the Tuskegee doctors didn't themselves infect their patients with a lethal condition, as is now proposed with embryos.