Sacred body? Stem cell research and human cloning

Ecumenical Review, The, July, 2002 by Heinrich Bedford-Strohm

The potential of this technique is obvious. It could be used not only for the injection of stem cells into, for example, a damaged brain; it also could lead to the production of organs to replace damaged ones, with no risk of anti-immune reactions. No wonder that experts see a multi-billion-dollar market in the future use of this technique.

However, medical scientists have emphasized that the medical prospects of therapeutic cloning are quite unclear, and may be realizable only in 20-30 years. Others have pointed towards a serious problem in its practical application for many patients: as we have seen, female egg cells are needed for the cloning technique. If only 10 percent of Germany's Parkinson patients were treated with this technique, 25,000 human clones would be necessary. As the experience with the cloning of animals has shown, hundreds of egg cells are necessary to produce just one clone. Thus, millions of female egg cells would be necessary to treat just a small portion of all patients who would be eligible for this therapy. It does not require much imagination to see how unrealistic this is. A look at the internet homepages of North American reproduction clinics shows that prices for donated egg cells range between 6000 and 17,000 dollars. But more important than the financial limitations is the troubling prospect of women being humiliated as mass donors of egg cells.

Scientists look therefore for alternatives to therapeutic cloning, but also to embryonic stem cell therapy in general. The most promising path towards alternatives which are ethically less problematic is the exploration of the potential of "adult stem cells". Adult stem cells exist in adult organisms only in small numbers. They are also less promising in their potential development than embryonic stem cells. But, in principle, they can be used for the same therapeutic purposes without carrying the ethical burden of existing only at the expense of a sacrificed embryo. However, if what leading medical scientists say is true, it cannot be denied that work with embryonic stem cells would lead to practicable therapies more quickly than comparable work with adult stem cells.

The ethical dilemma concerning both embryonic stem cell research and the related technique of therapeutic cloning is, therefore, not resolved simply by pointing towards possible alternatives. If, by stopping a certain line of research, suffering patients must wait longer for a cure or run a greater risk of never being cured, there have to be good ethical reasons for that.

Ethical reflection

Most Christian churches oppose research with embryos because they see the dignity of the human person violated when embryos are sacrificed for reasons outside themselves, as good as those reasons might be. If there are thoughts of liberalizing this ethical opposition, they relate to embryos which are "left over" from artificial insemination procedures and do not have in any case a realistic prospect of being born from a mother. The production of embryos with the goal of then sacrificing them in order to gain stem cells, as is the case with therapeutic cloning, is almost unanimously opposed.