by hilzoy
A few days ago, Katherine wrote and asked me what I thought of this piece about stem cells by Charles Krauthammer. When Katherine asks, I always try to answer; but what with one thing and another, I am only now getting around to it. I'm going to start with some minor quibbles with Krauthammer's editorial before getting to the central issue.
Krauthammer's basic point is this:
"Congress's current vehicle for expanding this research, the Castle-DeGette bill, is extremely dangerous. It expands the reach for a morally problematic area of research -- without drawing any serious moral lines."
What moral line in particular does Krauthammer think should be drawn? One that would rule out this:
"The real threat to our humanity is the creation of new human life willfully for the sole purpose of making it the means to someone else's end -- dissecting it for its parts the way we would dissect something with no more moral standing than a mollusk or paramecium. The real Brave New World looming before us is the rise of the industry of human manufacture, where human embryos are created not to produce children -- the purpose of IVF clinics -- but for spare body parts."
The quibbles: first, when Krauthammer talks about creating human life in order to 'dissect it for its parts', he is talking about somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT): creating a cloned embryo in order to harvest stem cells from it. (There is no other proposal that I'm aware of that begins to fit his description of 'the real threat'. Moreover, if you let blastocysts develop much beyond the point at which stem cells are harvested, you need to implant them in a woman's womb if they are to survive, and if there were a proposal that involved creating embryos, letting them develop past that point, and then 'dissecting them for their parts', I'm pretty confident that the scientific community would oppose it.) It's seriously misleading to talk about SCNT as 'dissecting a human life for its parts', though. Here are pictures of a blastocyst at five days, the point at which stem cells are harvested from it and the blastocyst is destroyed:
If the blastocyst were implanted in a woman's womb and allowed to develop, the sphere in the pictures (the trophectoderm) would become a placenta, and the clump of cells on its inside (the inner cell mass) would become a fetus. Now: I do not think that the presence or absence of 'parts' (other than a brain or nervous system) makes any difference morally. I do not think that it would be worse to destroy a blastocyst if it had little wisps of cells where arms and legs would someday be, and I am certainly not trying to argue that because it doesn't have cute little fingers and toes, we can do what we want with it.
I mention the question of 'parts' only because Krauthammer, who surely knows better, talks about 'dissecting' a blastocyst for its 'parts'. And I can't think why he would describe a blastocyst, which doesn't have any parts at all, in this way, if he didn't think that there was some mileage to be gained from making it seem as though scientists were proposing to dismember something a lot more like a baby.
Second, note that Krauthammer is criticizing the Castle-DeGette bill (HR 810) not on the grounds that there's something wrong with what it does, but that it fails to do something else altogether: namely, make SCNT illegal. But HR 810 is not alone in this: the energy bill, the highway bill, the appropriations bill for the Department of Commerce, and every other bill ever passed all fail to ban SCNT.
Moreover, there's a good reason why the people who drafted these bills have not taken the occasion to ban SCNT, namely that no bill which did so would pass the House and Senate. Consider the question: why have we not yet banned human reproductive cloning? More or less everyone, including the scientific community, agrees that reproductive cloning is a terrible idea, and that it should be illegal. The reason no such ban has passed is that there are two competing bills to ban it. One bans both reproductive cloning and SCNT, and the other bans reproductive cloning while explicitly making SCNT legal. (SCNT is legal now, since there is no law against it; the second bill states explicitly that it's legal, and imposes various ethical guidelines. Because of the present impasse, the law currently imposes no ethical guidelines on SCNT, and so as far as the law is concerned, anything goes. Luckily, this research is usually done in universities, which have ethical guidelines of their own.)
Neither of these two bills has been able to pass the House and Senate, and a compromise, banning reproductive cloning without taking a position on SCNT, seems remote. The upshot is that a practice that everyone thinks should be banned remains legal precisely because its fate has gotten tangled up with SCNT. I imagine that that's why the authors of HR 810 opted not to address that issue: they wanted to settle the issue they can get agreement on, and leave SCNT for another day. Given the present political situation, to have taken Krauthammer's advice would probably have meant not getting any legislation passed at all.
Third, Krauthammer gets the science wrong. He writes this about the President's stem cell policy:
"It failed practically because that cohort of embryos is a diminishing source of cells. Stem cells turn out to be a lot less immortal than we thought. The idea was that once you created a line, it could replicate indefinitely. Therefore you would need only a few lines. It turns out, however, that as stem cells replicate, they begin to make genetic errors and to degenerate. After several generations some lines become unusable.In addition, there has been a new advance since 2001. Whereas stem cells in those days had to be grown on mouse feeder cells, today we can grow stem cells on human feeder cells. That makes them far more (potentially) therapeutically usable."
I don't know who the 'we' is who were surprised that when you get DNA to copy itself repeatedly, errors creep in. It certainly wasn't the scientific community, which warned against this from the get-go. The only 'we' I know of who ever thought the President's policy made enough lines available consists of George Bush, Tommy Thompson, and (apparently) Charles Krauthammer. And it's an understatement to say that lines not grown on mouse feeder cells are 'far more (potentially) therapeutically useful' than the lines the President's policy lets people work on, since the latter are almost certainly not usable therapeutically at all. I mean, you could also say that driving a car is a far better way of getting from one place to another than sitting on the ground and saying 'vroom vroom vroom'. It's true, but it rather understates the difference.
The main issue raised by Krauthammer's piece is, of course, the morality of SCNT itself.
Some facts: SCNT does, in fact, involve creating a human blastocyst for the express purpose of harvesting its stem cells. And harvesting its stem cells necessarily destroys the blastocyst. So SCNT does involve creating life in order to do something that destroys it.
On the other hand, SCNT is also an incredibly useful technique. It's not just that it would allow us to create stem cells with a patient's own DNA, which could be used to provide stem cell therapies that would not trigger her immune system. That has gotten most of the publicity, and allowing patients to avoid the nightmare of immmunosuppression and possible transplant rejection would be a wonderful thing. However, for the foreseeable future it will be inefficient and expensive to grow individualized stem cell lines, and besides, since it will always take longer to create a stem cell line from scratch than to use one that already exists, individualized stem cell lines will never be useful when speed is of the essence -- for instance, in responding to strokes or heart attacks.
A lot of what makes SCNT really, really appealing to scientists has to do less with using it directly to make individualized therapies, and more with the sorts of research it would make possible. The whole point of SCNT is that it allows you to determine the DNA of your stem cell line. So long as you can find a human being with a given genetic profile who will let you scrape a few cells off her, you can create a stem cell line with that genetic profile. Moreover, you can use genetic engineering to modify those cells. If you're trying to help a patient who has a genetic disease that prevents the cells in her body from doing something they need to do, you could modify her DNA, create a stem cell line from that modified DNA, and voila! stem cells just like hers, only without the disease.
But this control over the genetic profile of stem cell lines is also incredibly useful for research. Suppose, for instance, that you wanted to understand what, exactly, goes wrong in the development of someone with cystic fibrosis, and to do this you want to watch the development of some stem cells that have the relevant genetic mutation. If you were using excess IVF blastocysts, you'd have to screen a whole lot of blastocysts before finding one that fit your needs. A whole lot. Whereas with SCNT you just need to find an adult who has cystic fibrosis, which is much easier. Then, if you needed to, SCNT plus genetic engineering would allow you to make one stem cell line with the mutation that causes cystic fibrosis and one without it, so that you could be certain that any differences that cropped up were due to that mutation, and not to some extraneous feature of the DNA you're working with. If you were just using excess IVF blastocysts, you couldn't do this at all.
Likewise, virtually all researchers who are working on adult stem cells think that their work will be greatly helped by research on embryonic stem cells. Comparing and contrasting the two, and understanding what lets embryonic stem cells turn into any sort of cell (except the trophectoderm -- the part of the blastocyst that becomes the placenta), while adult stem cells seem to be able to turn only into cells in a certain family, would be incredibly useful to adult stem cell research. Using SCNT, it would be possible to create adult and embryonic stem cells that shared the same DNA; and that would make it possible to see how they differed without having to worry about which differences were due to different DNA and which were not.
You get the picture: control over the genetic profile of an embryonic stem cell line is incredibly useful. It would let scientists do some things they couldn't do at all without SCNT, and others that would require screening an enormous number of blastocysts to find one with the right genetic profile. (And this isn't just a matter of scientists' convenience: screening takes time and money, and thereby delays discovering cures. So it translates not just into inconvenience, but into people with serious illnesses dying while they wait for cures to be found.)
On to the moral questions. There are, I think two: first, is it morally OK to destroy blastocysts? Second, is it morally OK to create blastocysts in order to do something that destroys them? I won't really deal with the first here: presumably, anyone who thinks that destroying a blastocyst is morally wrong should of course oppose SCNT, along with all other forms of embryonic stem cell research. It's the second question that gets at what's specially problematic about SCNT, so I'll restrict myself to that question.
Krauthammer writes: "The moral problem for that majority of Americans who, like me, don't believe that a zygote or blastocyst has all the attributes and therefore merits all the rights of personhood, is this: Does that mean that everything is permissible with a human embryo?" I think the answer to this question is: no. Just because you don't think it's wrong to kill a human blastocyst, that does not mean that you can do anything you like to it.
In particular, I think that we have an obligation to treat any form of human life, from conception onwards, with a certain sort of respect. What respect requires changes as a blastocyst develops into an embryo, a fetus, and then an infant, but I think it's there from the start. (And this doesn't require that I think that an embryo is "really" a person: I also think we ought to treat corpses with respect.) Once a developing human life acquires enough of a nervous system to become conscious, one can start to argue that it has interests of its own -- interests in not suffering, for instance, and also in not being killed. To my mind, however, such interests are not in play in the case of embryos that are not yet even minimally conscious; and while we can debate exactly when an embryo becomes minimally conscious, it's clear that a blastocyst, which doesn't have any neural cells at all, is not.
At this stage, what respect seems to me to require is just this: that whatever we do to a blastocyst, we should have good reasons for doing, reasons that are not just a matter of our own pleasure or entertainment. Just as I would think it wrong to carve up a corpse for fun, I would think it wrong to kill a blastocyst for one's own amusement or convenience. (This is why, though I am in favor of legalized abortion, I would think that someone who decided, on a lark, to try to have abortions in each of the fifty states, or who had an abortion just so that she could go to a really great party in her favorite dress (which, let's suppose, wouldn't fit if she were pregnant), was doing something abhorrent. I think you just shouldn't kill embryos for these sorts of reasons. I wouldn't be in favor of making such abortions illegal, but that's partly die to the same sorts of reasons that lead me not to favor a legal ban on being a complete insensitive jerk to one's significant other: doubts not about whether it's wrong, but about whether it would be a good idea to have the state policing our motives in the ways that would be required if it were criminalized.)
But while I think it's wrong to kill a blastocyst for no good reason, I don't think it's wrong to kill one period. I just think that respect requires that one recognize that one is doing something that should not be done lightly. I feel similarly about corpses: I do not think that carving them up for fun is OK, but I do think that a person who thinks her corpse should be treated with respect can appropriately leave her body to science, where it will be carved up for a non-frivolous purpose.
(Personally, I want to be an organ donor, but I also want to stipulate that if for some reason my organs are not usable, my body should be sent to the Body Farm: a place where they use bodies for forensic research. Why? Well, the research in question is sort of gross: they bury bodies to see which sorts of insects appear on them at which stages of decomposition; they get data on topics like how fast bodies decompose in the trunk of a car by sticking bodies in the trunks of cars and seeing what happens, etc. Many of the bodies they use are bodies that have been donated "to science"; and while this is, in fact, science, and very useful science too, I imagine that some of the people whose corpses end up being locked in a trunk or fed through a chipper/shredder or eaten by maggots for the sake of forensic science did not have this sort of thing in mind. Since I do, and I think it's fine for me to be used in this way, it seems to me that I should volunteer. And I don't think this is disrespectful to my future corpse: it seems to me the best thing that could happen to my corpse is for it to be of some use to someone. It will surely be of no future use to me.)
Because I think that respect requires that if we kill a blastocyst, we have a good reason for doing so, I have serious problems with IVF clinics that create excess embryos for what are, at bottom, reasons of convenience. But I do not have such concerns about SCNT. SCNT is not a frivolous, pointless use of blastocysts -- it's not like, say, coming up with some new line of hip fashion accessories with real human blastocysts! incorporated into them pour epater le bourgeois, or something. It's using human blastocysts in order to save the lives of existing human beings. And just as I think there's a clear distinction between carving a corpse up for fun and carving it up in the course of research, I think that while it would be wrong to create blastocysts and destroy them for fun, but I don't think it's wrong to do so in order to save people's lives.
(Note about blastocysts and corpses: there are obviously a lot of morally relevant differences between them. I use corpses as an analogy here because I think that there are certain similarities between what respect demands in the two cases, not because I think they are similar in any broader sense. Although I guess there is one further similarity that underlies the 'similar requirements of respect' point: in both cases, a central moral question is: how should we treat something that's worthy of a sort of respect, but that does not have any sort of sentience or consciousness, and thus no interests of the kind that conscious beings, let alone autonomous persons, have? But I don't mean to deny all the other obvious differences between the two.)
All done!
Whew. Read the whole thing, with breaks for thought. Lot of common-sense or intuitional morality that I am prone to question just cause I am a jerk, but nothing I would argue strongly about. Much seems to hinge on good taste, for instances, why not hand your deceased loved one to a taxidermist or have a shrunken head as a watch fob?
However, on human reproductive cloning, besides the fact that I can think of few good principled reasons for opposition (practically current inefficiencies make experiments abhorrent) I also have an intuition that the problems of defining what is a human being will get more complicated rather than less, and minds should be kept open. Although we won't be uploading ourselves to mainframes for a while yet.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | August 09, 2005 at 04:56 PM
Bob M: yeah, I was trying to figure out how to (a) keep the post to a manageable length, and (b) not do a full-bore phil. argument of the sort that would really only interest other philosophy types.
For what it's worth, I'm ready to argue that there are no problems with killing blastocysts other than those that come from arguments akin to those we use in thinking about corpses (though there are other sorts of arguments against non-lethally harming them, since in that case you will, eventually, be harming a sentient and conscious being). That there is a requirement not to kill blastocysts for no good reason needs a somewhat longer argument -- it comes from the farther reaches of my version of Kantianism -- but I was hoping that it would be a decent articulation of what some people who are not anti-abortion, but who do think that not anything goes, might be worried about.
That was the hope, anyways.
Posted by: hilzoy | August 09, 2005 at 05:03 PM
Sorry; this is unclear: "there are no problems with killing blastocysts other than those that come from arguments akin to those we use in thinking about corpses"
I meant: in a given instance, some act of killing a blastocyst might violate the sorts of requirements of respect that we also have with respect to corpses. There is no more direct prohibition against killing blastocysts.
Posted by: hilzoy | August 09, 2005 at 05:05 PM
I'm ready to argue that there are no problems with killing blastocysts other than those that come from arguments akin to those we use in thinking about corpses
But doesn't the requirement to treat corpses with respect derive, at least in part, from a requirement to honor the wishes of the deceased?
Isn't that why we don't take out organs for transplantation, or send bodies off to the anatomy lab or the Body Farm, unless the deceased specifically gave permission while alive?
Leaving the conclusion aside for the moment, it's hard for me to see how the cases are analogous.
Posted by: bernard Yomtov | August 09, 2005 at 05:35 PM
Bernard: you are (of course) right that there's nothing analogous, in the case of a blastocyst, to the requirement to respect the wishes of the deceased: blastocysts have no previously formed wishes. (This was one of the things I was thinking about when I wrote the 'I don't mean to suggest any deep similarity between blastocysts and corpses' paragraph.) However: suppose you don't know what a given person would have wanted done with his corpse. And suppose further that whereas in many cases you can make certain assumptions about this, in the case before you you can't. (Maybe the person whose corpse this was was so eccentric that you really can't say anything at all with confidence about what he would have wanted done with his corpse. Maybe a body washes ashore on your South Pacific island, and you don't know where it comes from, but you do know that there are lots and lots of isolated communities with very different, and incompatible, views on the treatment of the dead. Make up whatever story seems most plausible to you, so long as the upshot is: you are truly clueless about what someone would have wanted done, clueless enough that for any thing you might do to it, you think: I can't say that it's more likely that this person would have wanted this done than not, or that it's more likely he would not have wanted this done.)
In that case, you can have no idea at all what it would mean to respect the wishes of the deceased, so that question goes out the window. Are there any constraints on what you can do with the corpse? I think there are, actually, and these -- not the requirement to follow the wishes of the deceased -- are like the restrictions on what one can do with blastocysts.
Posted by: hilzoy | August 09, 2005 at 05:50 PM
I've been thinking along a whole different line. Here is this supposed big moral dilemna about doing things to a blastocyst that can't think or feel just because it is a potential person. Where is the concern about doing research on chimpanzees that can think and feel in ways very simlilar to us? (This isn't aimed at Hilzoy, of course).
I like Hilzoy's suggestion that respect be the basis for decision making. Empathy also would be a good basis for decision making in research--empathy for the creature involved in the research as well as empathy for the potential benefctors. It seem to me the Krauthammer's thinking is shallow on two fronts: he is obessed with the very beginning of human life at the expense of humans who are actually living, and he is only concerned with the moral issues involved in using human life, as if there was no moral issue involved in the use of other living things in experiments.
Posted by: lily | August 09, 2005 at 06:28 PM
Lily: actually, I think there are huge problems with experimenting on the great apes. At least we aren't catching them in the wild anymore -- they normally caught infants, which normally requires killing at least the mother, and sometimes more adults, and then taking the infant off for a horrible life of biomedical experimentation.
The issues involving animal experimentation are really contentious, especially since there has been a huge and bitter mini-war between animal rights activists and researchers, which had the effect of making both sides dig in their heels and refuse to listen to anything the other side said. But mercifully that bitterness is fading a bit.
I've always thought there's one thing that would make a huge difference, and that both sides ought to be able to agree on, namely: in most experiments on really smart animals, especially large ones, I'd guess that more suffering is due to their housing conditions than to the experiment itself. (Look at the housing for chimps in the photos on this page, for instance. We humans think that incarceration is one of the worst punishments there is. I don't see why it would be better for chimps.)
Adequate housing, which would give chimps enough room to move around and play and have something remotely resembling a decent life, would be expensive. But to me the question: should we spend money so that animals we use for research, sometimes painful research, without their consent, can have something approaching a tolerable life? ought to be an easy one. If we're going to conscript animals in this way, we owe them some gratitude. In any case, people who don't think that biomedical research on great apes is wrong might be able to agree that we should spend enough to give them a shot at a decent life; and in that way, even if we all keep disagreeing on the research, we can still eliminate most of their needless suffering.
Posted by: hilzoy | August 09, 2005 at 06:44 PM
"Where is the concern about doing research on chimpanzees that can think and feel in ways very simlilar to us?"
There are definitely problems with willy-nilly doing research on chimpanzees.
Posted by: Sebastian Holsclaw | August 09, 2005 at 06:55 PM
You know, I just can't comprehend the moral dilemma here. A blastocyst isn't a person. It doesn't even have the remotest capacity for considering its own existence or sensing the world around it. It's a relatively unsophisticated collection of living cells that happen to have human DNA. Bully for it--so are the occasional cells from my hair follicles that get deposited on my brush. But I don't cremate the hair that falls out, and I didn't hold a funeral for my fingernail the time I lost an entire one.
In Hilzoy's post, she says that she will not deal with the question of whether or not it is morally okay to destroy a blastocyst, and instead addresses whether it is okay to do so for good reasons. I'm sorry, but this is a dodge and I can't accept it--you are begging your first question in order to ask your second. For people who don't buy the premise that there is any inherent value or personhood in a blastocyst, your second is meaningless.
I can respect people who place value on a blastocyst for what it might, under the right circumstances, become. But an acorn is not an oak tree, and the distinction matters. We treat the question of whether it's right to cut down an old oak tree much differently than the question of what to do with an acorn lying on the ground, and people who have no problem with painting or doing silly craft projects with acorns might have a big problem with someone spraypainting an oak tree in their yard.
These distinctions are not something you blithely dispense with--they are the entire crux of the matter. You can't argue under what circumstances it's right to experiment on blastocysts without first making an assumption about their inherent value or nature.
Posted by: Catsy | August 09, 2005 at 07:26 PM
It's such a cute little blastocyst, though.
Posted by: Jeremy Osner | August 09, 2005 at 08:20 PM
Catsy: I wasn't trying to say that the question wasn't worth addressing. It's just that Katherine asked about this article, which is about SCNT, and SCNT raises two questions: (a) is it wrong to destroy blastocysts? and (b) is it wrong to create them in order to destroy them? So I was trying to address (b), not because the first question isn't worth asking -- it is -- but because I was trying to focus on what's special about SCNT; what makes it different from other ways of destroying blastocysts.
Posted by: hilzoy | August 10, 2005 at 12:04 AM
In that case, you can have no idea at all what it would mean to respect the wishes of the deceased, so that question goes out the window. Are there any constraints on what you can do with the corpse?
Yes, but they're self-imposed, arbitrary.
Maybe a body washes ashore on your South Pacific island, and you don't know where it comes from, but you do know that there are lots and lots of isolated communities with very different, and incompatible, views on the treatment of the dead.
Say bodies go to those places. They won't all be treated the same way but rather according to the local customs.
I think part of problem in the stem cell debate is that it would be something decided by customs if only there were stem cells two thousand flipping years ago. Now, even people who otherwise have the same customs (for the dead, for instance) come up with different ways to apply them to the new situation.
Posted by: Kyle Hasselbacher | August 10, 2005 at 02:33 PM
"Consider the question: why have we not yet banned human reproductive cloning?"
Oh, that's easy. We have not yet banned human reproductive cloning because rich people benefit from it.
Because rich people derive preferential benefit from it, George Bush will not ban it. (Rarely, there is a bit of grumbling about it - but never any serious opposition to it - on the Wingnut Right. But no pickets, no bombings of reproductive clinics, no assassinations of providers. Those attacks are reserved for services used by poor women.)
But because rich people derive no preferential benefit from further stem cell research, Bush wants to limit it.
It's really that easy.
Posted by: Bob O | August 12, 2005 at 01:40 AM
Thanks for this very interesting post. I wonder whether you see any difference between using blastocysts created via SCNT for research purposes and using so-called "surplus" blastocysts from IVF clinics? Mitt Romney, the Gov of my state (unfortunately), would permit the latter but ban the former, which strikes me as at best peculiar. Does anyone share my gut feeling that it's actually somehow "worse" to use a "surplus" IVF embryo, with its sperm-egg origin and unique DNA, for research, than to use an SCNT embryo, which is after all simply a carbon copy of its donor created by some technical wizardry?
Posted by: David | August 14, 2005 at 11:38 PM
David: the thing about excess IVF embryos is that almost all of them are either discarded or frozen indefinitely. (The existence of children who were once adopted embryos doesn't change this: no one really thinks that embryo adoption will even make a serious dent in the numbers of excess embryos.) So the thought is that if excess IVF embryos are going to be discarded or frozen indefinitely anyways, why not put them to good use? Whereas SCNT seems objectionable to some people just because it's creating embryos on purpose to be destroyed.
To my mind, if you're worried about IVF embryos, the thing to do would be to object to the practices that involve the creation of so many extra ones.
Posted by: hilzoy | August 14, 2005 at 11:53 PM
David, although I understand Hilzoy's logic, I actually do share your moral instinct regarding the use of frozen embryos created during an IVF process. Whatever else you can say about them, these embryos bear unique DNA sequences that are different from any other human, save perhaps an identical twin that might emerge upon implantation.
It seems to me that SCNT basically uses a human egg simply because it is a perfect medium in which to culture primitive cells of the type needed for further research, and because, as Hilzoy states, these cells enhances research opportnities because of they can be manipulated with incredible, possibly infinite, flexibility. The ONLY objection is that because these cells are placed within an egg they have the potential to be implanted. They do not, like the frozen embryos, bear a unique DNA sequence and were never intended at any level to become an infant. Perhaps I misunderstand what is happening through SCNT, but I am baffled by the idea that IVF embryos are preferable from a moral perspective.
P.S. The extra embryos aren't created so much as a matter of convenience, but as a matter of not knowing in advance how much attrition can be expected from retrieval to fertilization to three day growth to five day growth to implantation, etc. Once certain IVF techniques can be perfected (most notably, oocyte freezing) then surplus embryos will not be created. I do think that is the ultimate goal of those who engage in IVF, most of whom also don't particularly like the idea of embryos being frozen in perpetuity.
Posted by: Barbara | August 16, 2005 at 10:53 AM
Barbara -- as I understand it, that's right about why there are excess IVF embryos (also: being able to choose the one (or more) that looks healthiest). But to me, 'not having to make another if the first one dies' falls under the heading of 'convenience'. (I'm a lot more sway-able by the other, 'use the healthiest embryos of a group of, say, 9' argument; though even there, I think that setting criteria for what one will use and what one won't, creating embryos one by one, and then sticking by those criteria, would result in many fewer excess embryos being discarded.)
Posted by: hilzoy | August 16, 2005 at 11:04 AM
Well, I realize that the line between convenience and necessity can be malleable, but not having to undergo an invasive medical procedure more times than absolutely necessary doesn't seem like convenience to me. Let's say you get 10 eggs -- if you knew that 90% would fertilize, and 2/3 of those would make it to day three, and that 1/3 of those would make it to implanation, then you might only fertilize 5, in order to get 4 embryos, 2-3 of which might make it to day 3, and only one of which would implant, so no frozens. But if the range is 50% to 100% fertilize, and the other ranges are similarly wide and uncertain, then by not fertilizing all of them you are clearly risking the entire cycle, not just once but again and again if you keep adhering to the same methodology. When you are talking about larger numbers (say 20) then you are probably on firmer ground, although even there, there are definitely cycles in which only 5-6 out of 20 will fertilize.
But I suspect my bottom line is similar to yours: if these microscopic entities were able to contemplate their fate it would bother me a lot that they are suspended in a semi-permanent frozen status (presumably their viability will decline at some point), but they aren't, so it doesn't really perturb me a whole lot.
Posted by: Barbara | August 16, 2005 at 11:18 AM
Anyone here GOOGLE
to find out how SUPER GREAT adult style stem cells (ASC) are proving to be???
(For instance, GOOGLE:
adult stem cells pluripotent
(Yes, adult stem cells can now be manipulated to imitate other cells--the one touted benefit of the embryonic cells before)
Why back a morally dubious loser like embryonic stem cells???
Posted by: thinking above my pay grade | January 23, 2009 at 09:53 PM
Right now (last I heard) women had to be BLASTED with fertility drugs in order to overstimulate egg production.
(And I note--the gynecologist's women's health questionnaire now includes "taking fertility drugs" on its risk list...)
SOOO>>>>yet another risk (risk to the women used as "egg farms) might be ELIMINATED by using adult stem cells ASC
(Again GOOGLE adult stem cells pluripotent or treatments).. ASC wins the stem cell SUPERBOWL 100 to 3!!!
Posted by: thinking above my pay grade | January 23, 2009 at 09:56 PM