Accelerating Ethics

If futurist Ray Kurzweil is right, then the rate of change in technology is itself accelerating logarithmically. This article on the advance in Korean stem cell research may be just one example. It may also foretell the fall of Rome; it's just not clear yet if Rome is America or Asia. Ten years ago, the British cloned a sheep after biologists said it was not possible. It took till last year to clone an embryo, this time in Korea, but the process was so onerous that it was not worth duplicating. Proof positive to many that what is technically called somatic cell nuclear transfer would never be viable. Yet, in less than one year, that "never" has turned into a reliable method of producing stem cells that are genetically identical to the adult donor. This therapy has raised a lot of issues surrounding bioethics, yet most of the rest of the world has reached a place of comfort, including most religious leaders in industrialized countries. From a report on NPR's The World

"Apparently, at least according to Rabbi Weiner, Petri dish embryonic stem cell research is in accordance with Halacha (Jewish law). Religious views play a large role in Israel's stem cell program. The World's Aaron Schachter concludes our stem cell series by examining how the Judaic duty to care for the sick trumps ethical concerns over the rights of embryos created in the laboratory.

When Rabbi Yaakov Weiner looks for guidance on the morality about embryonic stem cell research, he turns to the same place he usually goes for answers. Rabbi Yaakov Weiner: From the Bible, the first book of Genesis. Weiner heads the Jerusalem Center for Research in Medicine and Halacha, or Jewish law. He points to one relevant biblical passage. Genesis 9, verse 6. Most modern Bibles translate this verse as a prohibition against murder. But Orthodox Jewish tradition interprets it specifically as a prohibition against abortion. Weiner translates the passage as follows: If someone spills the blood of a human, when this human is within another human, he gets capital punishment. So, aborting a fetus violates Jewish law, or Halacha. But if an embryo is created outside the womb, that's another matter.

Rabbi Yaakov Weiner: The embryos, which are in the Petri dish, according to Halacha, have no halachic status and I can either throw them away or I can use them for medical research. In fact, Weiner says, using embryonic stem cells for medical research is not just acceptable, it's encouraged. A Jewish principle called "pikuach nefesh" mandates that people do all they can to save human life, and that includes medical research that could one day lead to cures for disease. Weiner's decision, along with similar findings of other rabbis, and Muslim clerics, paved the way for Israel's acceptance of embryonic stem cell research."

As was also reported on NPR, Chinese researchers are proceeding full steam ahead with stem cell research, as well. One might question their ethics in the use of embryonic tissue unless you actually understood their ethics. Confucian ethicists have decided that life begins at birth, not conception. Thus, it is considered unethical NOT to use aborted fetal tissue for medical purposes. Ethics is not black and white. Chinese molecular biologists trained in the US are actually returning to China because that is where they think they have a future. Foreign investors are dumping huge amounts of money into projects that are part of a national initiative to win China a Nobel prize in regenerative medicine. They will likely devote a lot of effort towards nanotech and nanomedicine as well. China really has no chance of feeding and growing its population without some of the promises of nanotech. Chinese clinics are already successfully applying some of the procedures only studied in animals or small groups elsewhere.

For those who think it is the beginning of the end, then the end will soon be upon us. Because rapidly accelerating changes build upon their own momentum. With exponential growth in bioengineering techniques predicted, a few years delay will put us FOREVER behind Asia. Because a few years of progress will be like more than a decade at current rates. A decade will be more like a century. I predict that the first reports of well documented and dramatic cures from stem cell therapy will be rolling in from Korea by this time next year, if not sooner. And then many of the naysayers will just jump on the bandwagon.

So perhaps the US alone will survive this moral crisis or perhaps it is really no moral crisis at all. Orrin Hatch, an ardent conservative, abortion foes, yet also a longtime friend to herbalists (he wrote DSHEA to prevent the FDA from destroying the market), is also a staunch proponent of stem cell therapy. He personally is into fitness, diet and exercise, uses herbs regularly, etc. Like the Christian, Jewish and Muslim clerics worldwide who have said that the torah or old testament only bans the removal of life from a woman's womb, Hatch put it more succinctly. He said ""I understand why this form of stem-cell research may troublesome," Hatch said. "However, after many conversations with scientists, ethicists, patient advocates and religious leaders and many hours of thought, reflection and prayer, I reached the conclusion that human life does not begin in a Petri dish."

In other words, if you take an egg from woman, there is no life there. Unfertilized eggs get sloughed and flushed every day. So they alone are considered garbage, waste, etc. by everyone. In the same article, Robert Bennett, a longtime abortion foe, released a statement reiterating his position. The junior Utah senator said his views on the issue were influenced by his daughter's experience that some lab-created human embryos never are capable of developing toward birth. He explained: "We are very close to this issue in our family; one of our daughters has used in-vitro procedures in an attempt to have additional children." While the attempt was unsuccessful, Bennett said her experience showed him "that all embryos are not created equal; some are healthy enough to have a chance of survival, and some are not."

If you take one of these eggs, which has not ever been fertilized and implanted and remove the nucleus from that egg and replace it with the nucleus from an adult somatic cell and do this all in a Petri dish, I don't think anyone can really argue that there is any individual life there, any more life than there is life in the small piece of flesh that I accidentally cut off my finger while grating carrots. That small piece of flesh contains living cells that contain my DNA. If I could take that tissue and culture about 100 so-called adult stem cells from it in a Petri dish and no one would have a moral objection. Yet take my same DNA from that cell and put it into a donated egg cell with no DNA (perhaps even donated from myself if I was an adult female patient) and grow about 100 embyronic stem cells and that is somehow fiddling with life just because these cells could possibly maybe grow into a fetus if placed in a woman's uterus.

As many of you know, 75% of in vitro fertilizations fail, yet somehow that is NOT murder (which is no doubt at the crux of Senator Bennett's point above). The embryos do not result in life. They die anyway or are frozen and eventually disposed of. Trying and failing to bring children to infertile couples when millions need adoption is somehow a morally defensible reason to destroy 75% of the embryos that are created through failed IVF, yet using these same bunches of cells (not little people) to save the lives of already living human beings is immoral. If it is OK to sacrifice these cells for IVF, it is OK for stem cells. For the record, all Asian governments ban the last step of implanting cloned somatic cell transfers into wombs to "farm" actual humans for organ harvest, etc. That of course is the real fear, but we currently have a thriving international market in black market organs already. There will always be some of us who will do evil, but that is no reason to stop progress. The more happy and healthy people there are, the less crime and sociopathic behavior we can expect, as many long term trends show (the main variable affecting crime rates has always been levels of unemployment and wages). So the longterm gains outweigh the risks.

The reason I mention this has do with the issue of accelerating change. After decades of what seemed like plodding changes in science and medicine, we have reached the asymptotic point in the curve, where things are probably gonna go straight up through the roof. If I am wrong, we shall soon see. If we resist these changes for too long, rather than figure out how to embrace them as a highly desirable part of modern integrative healthcare, then we will be left very far outside the mainstream in a very short period of time. Many in the field of clinical applications of stem cell therapy are proponents of alternative medicine. The two work together nicely. Patients being treated with stem cells need to eat right, exercise, take certain supplements, etc in order to get the best results.

I certainly can't think of anything more "natural" than using youthful versions of my own cells to regenerate the old decrepit ones. Using myself at my peak as my medicine. That's how we should really think of Somatic Nuclear Cell Transfer (SNTC), which is the scientific name for so-called cloned embryos. Since the likelihood of successful fullterm development of a human clone is less even than normal IVF, I think we can say unequivocally that LIFE requires an implanted embryo in a woman's uterus. Lets say there is a soul? Only a cruel god would condemn such a soul to live in a frozen Petri dish for all eternity. It would seem far more likely that any soul would wait till implantation before taking up residence.