Wesley J. Smith, author of
Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World, has also generously taken the time to help answer my doubts:
Yes. Your biology is wrong. The embryo is indeed destroyed in ESCR [Embryonic Stem Cell Research]. The fact that parts taken from the embryo, the stem cells, can be maintained and grown in culture, is not the same thing as having a bunch of embryos growing in culture. If you implant the original embryo, a baby could result. Implant the embryonic stem cells derived and multiplied in culture from that embryo and no baby will ever result because stem cells are just cells, they are not organisms, they are not embryos.
This is a rough analogy: If we killed you for your heart and maintained it through technology, your heart would still be beating but you would be dead.
It isn't the use of the embryonic stem cells that is problematic, it is how they are derived, e.g. destroying embryos. In the case of human therapeutic cloning, the problem is that scientists want to create human embryos to be destroyed.
The induced pluripotent stem cells are not embryos. They too are merely cells, skin cells in this case, that through genetic manipulation were changed into pluripotent stem cells. Moreover, they are not embryonic stem cells. Other tissues may also produce pluripotent stem cells, such as bone marrow and umbilical cord blood. Surely, you wouldn’t say those are embryos, would you? Similarly, neither are the iPS cells.
A stem cell is just a cell, it is not an organism. It is not an embryo. It doesnt have any more intrinsic moral value than the cells you destroyed today when you brushed your teeth.
I think it is the term embryonic that has some people confused. Use pluripotent (the capacity to change into every tissue type) and it becomes easier to understand.
Hope this helps.
After this explanation, I still seem to be left with the problem:
Why is everyone so sure that the pluripotent stem cells (whether induced or from embryos) are just organs, not organisms?
There seem to be a couple of flaws -- or maybe just skipped steps that need to be fleshed out for those of us without the scientific background -- in these two parts of Smith's argument:
#1: According to Smith
Implant the embryonic stem cells derived and multiplied in culture from that embryo and no baby will ever result because stem cells are just cells, they are not organisms, they are not embryos.
But what about the fact that Dr. Yamanaka
"completed the ultimate test to show that the resulting stem cells could become any type of mouse cell. He used them to create new mice."
Yamanaka had to do more than just put the pluripotent cells into a mouse womb (as he could have done with a clone) but presumably less than he would have had to do with a skin cell (or else this "ultimate test" would have proven nothing at all). Clearly, reprogramming the skin cell into a pluripotent stem cell took it some distance toward becoming an embryo. It still seems to me difficult to understand why critics of embryonic stem cell research aren't at all concerned that maybe that reprogramming took it far enough to be, at least arguably, an embryo.
#2. According to Smith
This is a rough analogy: If we killed you for your heart and maintained it through technology, your heart would still be beating but you would be dead.
But isn't this at least as true an analogy: If we cut off my head and maintained it alive through technology, my brain might still be thinking -- and how would we be sure that I wasn't (in some sense) still alive and still deserving of human rights?
After all, when the embryos are disaggregated to get the pluripotent stem cells, the part of the embryo that the scientists keep alive and growing (and now call "stem cells" instead of "the embryo") still has in it the very cells that would have (if left unmolested) gone on to form the human brain, just as clearly as it contains the cells that would have gone on to form the heart.
