Forging Ahead Blindly With Cloning

With scientists in South Korea successfully extracting stem cells from a cloned human embryo last month, Harvard has vowed not to fall behind. Just last week, Provost Steven E. Hyman confirmed pre-existing plans to spend several million dollars creating a new center for stem cell research. Upon hearing about the Korean advance in February, the center’s co-director David T. Scadden had remarked, “It’s a terrible disappointment that we’re reading about it from other countries. It’s imperative that we be able to use this technology in the U.S.” But Harvard’s decision to build and fund this new center, cutting-edge scientific development though it may be, is disturbing for its abrogation of the moral leadership which Harvard, as one of the world’s top research institutions, must exercise. While Harvard has not explicitly stated its intention to clone human embryos for use in future research, the University’s rhetoric and tone suggest that it will.

Scadden’s suggestion that the U.S. should catch up is most troubling because stem cell research using cloned embryos, as in South Korea, relies on a process similar to human cloning. Defending cloning-based stem cell research and attempting to distinguish it from complete cloning, researchers explain that the cloned embryo is never implanted in a womb. But this is merely a procedural, technical distinction. The difference morally between cloning an embryo to be used for research and cloning it to create life is much less clear: In both cases, the researchers are cloning a person and playing God.

If there is a moral distinction to be made between using embryos for research and implanting them in a human womb, then the former is far worse. In the case of full-blown cloning, scientists are at least creating a life; but in the case of cloning-based stem cell research, they are merely creating life to destroy it. Embryos used for research have the same genetic structure as the human organism; they are analogous to fertilized eggs, capable under the right conditions of developing into fully functioning human beings.

Although a Faculty of Arts and Sciences report about the center, circulated in January, stipulates that “the Institute…proposes to address the complex social, ethical and religious questions that have arisen as stem cell research has advanced,” Harvard plans to proceed anyway with research which many Americans find morally repugnant. The center, then, is largely paying lip-service to ethical objections. Actually proceeding with controversial research is a very interesting way to “address” peoples’ concerns. Indeed, the University has shown no reluctance to shelve ethical considerations to be at the forefront of stem cell research: Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences Douglas A. Melton, another co-director of the new center, announced two weeks ago that he and a team of scientists would release 17 stem cell lines which they had extracted over the past few years.

If Harvard wants unabashedly to pursue stem cell research with all of the ethical baggage that carries, it should say without equivocation why it does not find the religious, ethical and moral objections to this kind of research to be valid. Harvard’s behavior to date, however, suggests that it is already confident in its answers to moral questions—namely, that such questions are not important and need not be seriously considered before proceeding—and that it merely needs to convince Americans of the intrinsic rightness of its position by presenting them with a fait accompli. Harvard is not alone, though; many scientists elsewhere forge ahead with stem cell research, insensible to ethical objections, and this is justified with the rhetoric of progressivism. Helen M. Blau, director of the Baxter Laboratory in Genetic Pharmacology at Stanford University School of Medicine, frets that as “leaders of biomedical research,” American scientists on the whole are “falling behind.” Such talk of progress obscures the ethical questions—some of the more truly monumental issues which stem cell research raises. Harvard should strive to be a leader in consideration of these issues, not merely a leader in the process of research itself, never normatively evaluated.

Although the center will undoubtedly keep the proceedings of its research conspicuously legal, the University’s insistence on pursuing research not sanctioned by federal research grants is nonetheless troubling. There is a reason that federal grants are limited to pre-existing stem cell lines: Considerable debate and controversy surrounds such research. Harvard’s leadership role as a research institution demands it pay attention to this controversy. In one of the most critical evaluations of stem cell research at Harvard so far, Hyman proclaimed, “It’s something Harvard ought to be doing. It is something we can be preeminent in.” Whether Harvard ought to be cloning human embryos, however, is an issue quite different from whether it can be expert in doing it. Scientists in South Korea have been creating human life only to destroy it, and thus more critical examination is needed to determine whether this is something Harvard really ought to do.

Mark A. Adomanis ‘07 is a first-year in Pennypacker Hall.