What is Stem Cell Research Really About?

In the April, 2007 issue of Brain in the News published by Dana Press, there’s an article titled Stem Cell Research Opens New Doors, written by Carl T. Hall and originally published in The San Francisco Chronicle. I would recommend regular visits to Dana’s website ( Dana Foundation) to anyone interested in modern medical sciences, especially the study of the brain or immune system, and also those interested in the ethics of medicine and medical research.

In the article the April, 2007 issue of Brain in the News, Mr. Hall tells us:

One argument for stem cell research is that it might generate fresh replacement cells for those destroyed by such horrific diseases as ALS, the paralyzing nervous system disorder popularly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The latest research suggest those predictions might be unrealistic: Replacing cells that die off in a disease still leaves open the question of why the cells died in the first place, which is the critical issue in any autoimmune disease, or degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.

The findings may be the most dramatic example yet of the idea that stem cells are valuable as a “disease model” — used to study disease — rather than a simple source of replacement parts.

Stem cell colonies were used in experiments which discovered that nervous system damage in ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) was not due to problems with the nerve cells; it was a result of poisons coming from diseased cells surrounding those nerve cells.

As a next step, some scientists plan to, roughly speaking, transfer DNA from diseased cells in ALS patients into stem cells and watch as the disease progresses, presumably in the neighborhood of stem cells grown into the type of nerve cells which die to give the terrible symptoms of ALS.

As someone who is opposed to the use of any human being, or possible human being, as the means to the ends of another, I wonder what sorts of stem cells were used in these experiments. I’ve also read enough of the accessible scientific literature in this field to know that the pro-life leaders live in la-la land. The four or so types of stem cells have different properties and morally obtained stem cells don’t have the right properties for all types of medical uses, research or therapeutic. Even when adult stem cells can be altered to be somewhat like embryonic stem cells, a careful observer will note the alterations depend upon technology that will possibly allow the higher classes to create customized human beings, perhaps dumb and physically tough or perhaps capable of sexual feats beyond the desires of most of us.

My first general comment is: We are a in a state of moral decay where all powerful technologies are potentially evil. Some of the technologies which are potentially of good moral use are at least as dangerous as the technologies which are evil from the get-go.

Our problem isn’t one to be solved by the sorts of policy wonks we’ve all become, even those with honest and noble intentions to protect traditional moral values. We need to recognize that our society has removed many of our moral constraints. As the novelist Flannery O’Connor pointed out a half-century ago: we Americans are not a moral or compassionate people, we are merely squeamish. Our moral limits melt away a little more when we realize we might be able to increase our prosperity or safety or comfort by going just a little further. The nations of the West support medical research, technological exploitation, entertainment, and social experiments of a sort which would have horrified our grandparents. Our general decay, our tendency to create problems and to destroy moral and political traditions rapidly, would indicate that we shouldn’t assume that we’re the ones who know better than our grandparents. At 52, I’m old enough to remember the attitudes of those days which were, to be sure, the true parents of our days. If someone had described a society like ours to my grandmother in, say, 1965, she would have gasped and labeled that society as being evil.

As numerous commentators have conjectured, Hitler and Stalin won the battle for the hearts of modern human beings. In fact, the neo-marxist Horkheimer once claimed that radicals owed a lot to American businessmen who proved they could destroy families better than the toughest and most competent of modern dictators. I would add that the moral giants of our corporate world dissolve traditional moral institutions of all sorts but otherwise Horkheimer was almost right on target, though he missed the important role played by the American government in all of this. Modern human beings have been bribed to walk away from the institutions which once embodied the moral traditions of the Christian West. The result is a gentler and kinder Reich, a more efficient version of the Bolshevik Empire. Every entity on earth, every bit of flesh, has become a means to the end of increasing the prosperity of society which defines prosperity not in terms of human and humane goals but rather in terms of material wealth, of safety, of comfort. We value long lives and have forgotten about good lives.

We haven’t seen the worst of it yet. If it now seems necessary to study ALS by observing multiple types of human cells grown in the laboratory, what will we do when we discover that ALS or some other horrible disease is really a complex disease of multiple parts of the human body? So far as I can predict the future, we’ll begin to grow human babies in the laboratory and not just any human babies but babies customized to have particular forms of those horrible diseases so that the progression of those diseases can be studied under controlled conditions. Our public morality is such that we’ll have no good arguments against doing this.

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