Imagine what it's like to open the newspaper (as I did Friday morning) and read that scientists in South Korea have made a huge breakthrough toward curing a disease that is slowly wrecking your life. But your own government is trying to prevent that cure.
Other nations are racing for the leadership role in stem cell research that the United States has abandoned. And states such as California are defying the federal near-ban. So it seems unlikely that U.S. government policy will actually prevent a cure for my Parkinson's and other diseases. Still, it's not too likely that a cure will come in time for most current sufferers in any event. But it might, it might. So when my government slows the process, it is disheartening.
The South Korean scientists apparently have developed a reliable method for producing an embryo by cloning genetic material from an adult human being. The theory is that stem cells extracted from a clone of yourself are likely to be safer and more effective than cells from leftover embryos in fertility clinics or from animal embryos or from adult bone marrow.
Leon R. Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, greeted this thrilling news with his usual fatuous call for a "moratorium" on the research that produced it, while we think through the morality and all that. Kass seems to imagine bioethics researchers beavering away toward a moral breakthrough even as scientists beaver away at a medical one. All he asks is for the scientists to take a break and let the bioethicists catch up.
But no crash research program is going to produce some dazzling bioethical principle we never thought of before. We know all that we're going to know about the moral issues, and we just have to decide. There are three issues: First, do the embryos used for stem cell research and therapy have rights? They are clumps of a few dozen cells, biologically more primitive than a mosquito. They have no consciousness, are not aware that they exist, and never have been. Nature itself creates and destroys millions of these every year. No one objects. No one mourns. In most cases no one even knows. If my life is worth no more than the survival of one of these clumps, then it is terribly unfair that I can plead my case on the Op-Ed page and they can't. But I have no trouble feeling that the government should value my life more than the lives of these clumps. God may disagree. But the government reports to me and to other adult Americans, not to God.
