And a strong word of thanks to Chip Maxwell, the Executive Director of Nebraska Coalition for Ethical Research, who is doing truly wonderful work in this important cause, including getting this latest effort realized.Ethical Ignorance is Not Bliss
Last Friday, the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee conducted an interim study hearing on stem cell and cloning research. The impetus for this hearing is LB 700, the Human Cloning Prohibition Act introduced by Sen. Mark Christensen in the 2007 legislative session.
Since its introduction, LB 700 has remained stuck in committee with insufficient votes to advance it to the full Legislature for debate. The purpose of this hearing was supposedly to facilitate a deeper examination of this controversial research.
The arguments against cloning and embryonic stem cell research were made by Dr. Maureen Condic, Dr. John Safranek and Dr. Lou Safranek. Dr. Condic, a stem cell researcher and director of instruction in human embryology at the University of Utah, presented a scientific explanation of stem cell and cloning research.
Armed with compelling facts, backed up with unimpeachable sources, Dr. Condic explained why human embryonic stem cell and cloning research is bad science that is unlikely to produce human therapies in the near future, if at all.
The Safranek brothers are from Omaha and are both medical doctors with additional doctorates in philosophy and ethics. They addressed the ethical concerns with this research. In particular, Dr. John Safranek decimated the assertion by a University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) doctor that human cloning for research purposes does not produce a human embryo.
The UNMC doctor, James Turpin, asserted in public testimony earlier this year and again on Friday that the cloning technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) only produces stem cells not an embryo. Dr. Safranek refuted this assertion with one word: Dolly. Dr. Safranek pointed out that Dolly the sheep resulted from an act of somatic cell nuclear transfer. The irrefutable fact is that the only way Dolly could have existed is if the act of SCNT resulted in an embryo that was subsequently implanted and gestated to live birth.
Turpin defends his assertion by pointing to embryology textbooks that define an embryo as a genetically distinct individual produced through fertilization (combining of sperm and egg). Since SCNT (i.e. cloning) doesn’t involve fertilization and the “product” of cloning is genetically identical to the person who donated the somatic (body) cell, Turpin insists that it isn’t an embryo.
Both Dr. Condic and Dr. Safranek pointed out the absurdity of this assertion. If being a human embryo requires an act of fertilization and genetic uniqueness, then how does Dr. Turpin explain identical twins? Identical twins, triplets, etc. are genetically identical and only one was the result of fertilization; the others split off (twinned) from the first.
What was most discouraging and disappointing about this hearing was the lack of a substantive discussion on the central point of contention in this debate: does embryonic stem cell (ESC) and cloning research involve the destruction of early human life? As I stressed in my testimony, the arguments in favor of this research are compelling if, and only if, the answer to that question is no.
Amazingly, proponents of ESC and cloning research seldom, if ever, provide any meaningful or compelling arguments to defend their presumption that human embryos have no moral status. None of the UNMC panelists last Friday said a word to defend this extraordinarily dangerous presumption. And sadly, no senator on this committee asked them to do so. Avoidance of difficult and contentious ethical questions about ESC and cloning research will not make them go away. It will only exacerbate the injustice of this research and intensify the debate.
