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The Thing IsAt the bioethics council, human nature denies human nature.

By William Saletan
Posted Monday, March 7, 2005, at 3:29 AM ET

Is it allright to create and destroy something almost human? That's the big topic at Friday's meeting of the President's Council on Bioethics. Council member Bill Hurlbut, a Stanford biologist, wants to end-run the moral debate over stem cells. He proposes to follow the recipe for human cloning—put the nucleus of a body cell into a gutted egg cell—but turn off a crucial gene so that the resulting "biological artifact" produces stem cells without organizing itself into an embryo. According to a draft white paper prepared by council staff, "Several scientists have indicated that they believe [the plan] can easily be made to work, and a few are apparently ready to try it out in non-human animals."

What do the assembled M.D.'s and Ph.D's think of this idea? "I'm not sure we ought to be creating these bizarre organisms," frets council member Charles Krauthammer. His colleague Robert George assures him that the artifact wouldn't be an organism: "It would have to be a distinct non-embryonic creature for Bill to—or, not creature, but embryonic entity—for Bill to endorse it." Krauthammer pounces on the gaffe. "I'm afraid it was that slip of the tongue which troubles me," he says. "You call it an entity; I see it as a creature. ... That's why I'm repelled by it in principle."

George asks Krauthammer whether the kind of tumor to which Hurlbut has likened the artifact—a teratoma, which grows rudimentary bits of body parts—is a creature. It's "an attempt at a human that didn't go right," Krauthammer ventures. "I'm not sure we ought to want to reproduce that." He alludes to an essay by council chairman Leon Kass: "It could be what Leon calls sort of the wisdom of revulsion." ("Repugnance," Kass whispers, correcting him.) George says weirdness and repugnance aren't moral problems, but Krauthammer adds, "Repugnant, weird, and somewhat human. If it's just repugnant and weird, it's just an aesthetic issue. If it's somewhat human, it's a moral issue."

This is the confusion into which Hurlbut's idea has thrown the council. On one side are people who think it's icky but can't explain why. On the other side are people who deny it's a creature but can't get over the resemblance. How is an attempt an organism? How does humanity make weirdness immoral? What the hell is a non-embryonic entity? Don't ask these doctors and ethicists. Biotechnology is outrunning their comprehension.

What exactly is the alleged non-creature? Hurlbut calls it an artifact. George calls it an entity. Krauthammer calls it "an aborted attempt to produce a human." Council member Paul McHugh calls it a "thing." Council member Peter Lawler calls it "a third category that's not life or non-life but kind of a near-life experience." Council member Michael Sandel calls it "an embryolike being ... the creature or the being or the thing created, the artifact." Council member James Q. Wilson sputters, "We can't even adequately describe these things. We're inventing names as we go along."

And what exactly is wrong with creating it? It's "creepy," says Sandel. It's "a tragedy," says Krauthammer. It's "begun to bother me," says council member Dan Foster. It's a "pollution of the human genome that I have a yuck factor towards," says McHugh.

Yuck? Pollution? We're already hip deep in it. "We give people a dose of disease, vaccination," Hurlbut observes. We "send in reengineered cells, targeted toxins. We grow sheets of skin from cells harvested from foreskin. We cut the body." The whole point of stem-cell research, he points out, is greater power to manipulate human tissue. "Are you going to grow human parts apart from bodies?" he asks. "Are you going to have factories of kidneys? Are we going to grow brains in vats?"

We're also creating embryolike beings while telling ourselves they aren't embryos. Last year, scientists in South Korea cloned a human embryo (or whatever you want to call it) and grew it far enough along to extract stem cells. At Friday's meeting, McHugh insists such creations "won't become human." Hurlbut replies that Dolly the sheep had to have been an embryo, but McHugh repeats that the product of cloning is "nonviable." Sandel denounces Hurlbut's plan as "genetically engineering and using an embryolike being" for any purpose. Hurlbut asks incredulously how Sandel can complain about a "mutant human being," since Sandel has endorsed cloning and has suggested an ethical distinction between zygones and "clonotes."

Soon, Hurlbut finds himself squeezed between the yuck factor and the not-an-embryo defense. Council member Janet Rowley says his artifact wouldn't be like a teratoma because it's really just a "human embryo with one gene defect." Council member Francis Fukuyama complains that the entire discussion has left him more confused. Hurlbut pleads that teratomas were just supposed to be an analogy. Given "our natural moral sentiments," he says, it's hard for us to accept that we can "create [human] parts apart from the whole, so that we're not violating human dignity."

I think Hurlbut is right about the natural science of humans but wrong about human nature. He's right that we can make human parts and artifacts without the whole. He's right that we're doing so now and that this power will grow. But the superficial resistance he's trying to dispel is connected to the deep thing he's trying to protect. Our natural moral sentiments—the yuck factor—are guided by analogy and rooted in dignity. It's in our nature to see the resemblance between an embryolike being and ourselves. And it's in our dignity to deny that the difference between us and something intrinsically meaningless can be so small, even if it's true.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
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Remarks from the Fray:

What does uniquely separate a human life from a clump of human cells with absolutely no potential for growing into anything more than that? Many used to hope genetics would someday provide the definitive answer. The DNA in all life forms was consistent but the arrangement of human genes was bound to be unique or complex or special is some significant way. Unfortunately, the genome mapping projects have shown that to be less true than even our most pessimistic nightmares. All human beings have about ninety-nine point nine percent of our genes in common with each other, so individuality is a pretty fragile thing. But the same could be said of our identity as a species.

We have about ninety-eight percent of our genes in common with our closest genetic cousins, the apes. Among most other mammals we are still in the eighty to ninety-five percent range and even Zebra Fish share about eighty-five percent of our genes. It is only when we move to insects and plants that we begin to drop below fifty percent gene commonality…

…Everybody wants to protect human morality and human dignity. But arguments over tiny differences may be foolish not because they make for vast differentiation but because what is common to all life sweeps over such wider memes than anyone ever previously understood or dared believe. If preserving the status quo is the natural penchant of Krauthammer and other conservatives, they should understand that Hurlburt's proposal is not antipodal to Man the Moral Creature but is completely consistently with and a natural extension of Man the Toolmaker.

What percent human? For teratomas that percent may be far more than the pro-research camp would care to admit they have been desperately drawing bring lines around and the differentiation it entails far less than the conservatives would like to believe they are desperately holding a moral line to maintain. Human dignity aside, sometime the Truth is just . . . icky.

--The_Bell

(To reply, click here)


When Krauthammer calls this technique "an aborted attempt to produce a human," it seems he's getting it exactly wrong.

As Saletan describes it, this appears very clearly to be an attempt not to produce a human. Perhaps that's what's really bothering some people: the deliberate negating of potential.

As it's described here, I can't tell if the technique involves creating what might become a viable clone and then shutting off its copy of the "crucial gene," or if the gene is disabled before implantation in the egg cell. The latter might be a more acceptable approach to some people, because then at no point is an entity with possible human potential being created.

Krauthammer's comment is worse because of his choice of the word "aborted." Either that's a subconscious slip, or he's deliberately trying to blur this debate with another one that stirs greater passions…

--Sharpner

(To reply, click here)


The blueprint for [Hurlburt's] recipe is as follows:

1) Extract the reproductive DNA from an unfertilized human egg cell.

2) Inject the DNA for some other sort of cell, further down the developmental tree.

3) The egg cell will then divide and produce descendant cells of a very limited type, incapable of ever, under any circumstances, becoming a human being.

To me, this is about as morally controversial making my toenails keep growing after they've been cut off. Icky, maybe, but immoral?? Give me a break!

…There's an old Russian proverb about the farmer who brings his cow into his house with him to keep from freezing to death in the long Russian winter. The farmer thinks it's icky to have the cow in his house, and filthy, and smelly. . . . but the cow is a necessity. And in time he gets used to it, because he has to.

Same thing will happen here. Stem cell research is simply too damned useful for an aging population to forego, and the rest of our social assumptions will accommodate that fact over time.

--Thrasymachus

(To reply, click here)

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