What’s the Point of It All?
Some more good news on stem-cell research, but all is not well. An honest researcher points out a fact which is inconvenient for those of us who think one human being should never be used as the means to the end of another human being.
In Twenty Disease-specific Stem Cell Lines Created, we read:
Harvard Stem Cell Institute researcher George Q. Daley, MD, PhD, also associate director of the Stem Cell Program at Children’s Hospital Boston, and HSCI colleagues Konrad Hochedlinger and Chad Cowan have produced a robust new collection of disease-specific stem cell lines, all of which were developed using the new induced pluripotent stem cell (iPS) technique.
The new iPS lines, developed from the cells of patients ranging in age from one month to 57-years-old and suffering from a range of conditions from Down Syndrome to Parkinson’s disease, will be deposited in a new HSCI “core” facility being established at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), HSCI co-director Doug Melton announced yesterday. The operations of the iPS Core will be overseen by a faculty committee, which Daley will chair.
Later in the article, we read:
While Daley, President of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, is enthusiastic about the promise of reprogramming studies, he is far from ready to abandon experiments with embryonic stem cells. Daley believes that reprogramming and ESC research must advance in tandem to bring cell therapy to the clinic as quickly as possible.
Christians have fallen over each other in the recent past to justify good and moral uses of stem-cell technology so long as we might solve our medical problems and might be relieved of the responsibility for moral witness. In this article, I’ll not discuss the moral error in using any human being (including babies murdered years ago) as the means to the ends of other human beings. (See What is Stem Cell Research Really About and Are All Scientists Evil? and Human Cloning: Legal/Ethical Flux for such arguments.)
We can’t live forever. We can’t solve all medical problems anymore than we can stop earthquakes or volcanoes. We do what we can to help ourselves and others, especially the children, but we do no good by sacrificing our moral integrity, by growing or making things which might well be evil and putting them in our bodies or the bodies of children.
We Christians proclaim a belief in a resurrection into life without end as the companions to our Lord Jesus Christ and yet we make no serious protests against a society that sets its goals to maximize life-span and comfort and material prosperity, considering moral preferences — truths would be too strong a word for our views — only as secondary matters. True Christians would decide to live in recognition of moral truths, to live in such a way that we would nurture our love of God and our human moral integrity first and try to lengthen our lives or ease our sufferings as a secondary matter.
Tags: Christian moral teachings, modern medical system, Moral issues, Stem cell research
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.