No nonsense science
Elizabeth Finkel is a writer I particularly admire. She's thorough, clear and logical. I also like it when people rip into pseudoscience, or otherwise faulty science. So this article (linked above) was a particular treat for me.
It's about biologist James Sherley, who opposes embryonic stem cell research because he "has a belief that the cloned embryos under discussion are human beings". Finkel goes through his defective logic and tears it up, which is great.
One thing she doesn't spell out (although it was immediately obvious to me) is that Sherley has a conflict of interest. His area of research is adult stem cells. So he has a lot to gain by lobbying for embryonic stem cell research to be shut down.
And I don't like to see people pushing their religious views into politics or science. A quick search on Google didn't tell me definitively that Sherley is Christian, but I'd put money on it. And like our extremely unbiased, balanced and reasonable federal Minister for Health, he's allowing his personal beliefs to interfere with things that affect people's personal lives.
The embryonic stem cell debate and the abortion debate boil pretty much the same question: Is an embryo, whether several days or several weeks old, a human being? The answer to this question has far-reaching implications. In the case of abortion, it affects women who have been raped; or whose babies will be born with debilitating abnormalities; or who will not be fit mothers (for example, in cases of drug abuse. In the case of embryonic stem cells, every effort to stymie research delays treatments that may help people with brain damage, spinal cord damage, muscular dystrophy, and many other conditions.
Such decisions should not be made based on a minority, or even majority, religious opinion. They should be made using science, which can give a definite answer as to when an embryo gains consciousness and can therefore suffer or be considered even remotely like a human being. I think that an uneducated person may imagine a baby-like fetus being murdered for a few cells. But embryonic stem cell research uses embryos that look roughly like this:
Because the embryos used are so undeveloped, to me it's an even clearer issue than abortion, which I think should be safely available to all women.
But don't listen to me. Let the science do the talking.
2 Comments:
A fascinating post: this issue has given me much pause for thought. To me it would seem that the process of 'becoming a human being' is a non-discrete, fluid process. It is only the necessity of legislation that imposes the need to draw lines of demarcation, but those lines are ultimately arbitrary. There are abortion doctors who will physically remove identifiable limbs, but they are within the bounds of the law so the baby is not "human". Does the fact that this stem cell looks nothing like a person preclude the possibility that it is?
You're right, the process of becoming human is probably non-discrete. However, legislation will ideally be formed based on discrete scientific measures. Perhaps before the brain begins to form, or before neurons begin firing in it. So it's less to do with what the embryo looks like and more to do with what it can do. It certainly shouldn't be arbitrary. At the stage shown in the picture, the embryo consists of only a few cells. They haven't differentiated at all yet; that's the whole point of harvesting them. The more they have differentiated, the less useful they are to scientists.
Although I've said that abortion and embryonic stem cell use are the same, their purposes are different and therefore they should be treated differently. ESCs will always come from the earliest stage possible, and always from unwanted embryos left over from IVF -- they would not be used otherwise. This is for both ethical and practical reasons.
Abortion is far more complex as a woman's rights come into play. In Australia, the laws vary from state to state but abortions can happen quite late if there is a good reason (such as severe fetal abnormalities). So there is room to oppose abortion and support ESC research.
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