In May the Vatican announced that it was beginning a cooperative venture in adult stem cell (ASC) research with the international biotech firm NeoStem.  Although the Catholic Church has patronized the sciences for centuries, this is the first contractual foray into stem cell research with a for-profit secular corporation.  NeoStem (listed on the Amex) has pharmaceutical operations in the US and China.  The company is launching a development program in adult stem cell therapies in addition to building adult stem cell collection banks in the U.S. and China to allow people to harvest and store their own stem cells as a type of clinical insurance toward future medical need.  Its Chinese division, its website says, was established in order “to leverage the country’s progressive stem cell environment” (www.neostem.com).  NeoStem’s operations with the Vatican—specifically with the Pontifical Council for Culture (PCC)—will run through the corporation’s non-profit foundation “Stem for Life.”  The firm will bring to the relationship its considerable expertise in clinical ASC research; the PCC—extraordinarily—is bringing one million dollars and the “reach” of the Church’s influence.  The New York Daily News reported on May 25 that the money will come from two foundations, but the Vatican has not revealed their names [1].

This question is very insightful and well formulated. Although I believe that embryo adoption is in principle legitimate and even can be praiseworthy, the problem of unintended harmful consequences is very real.

When I speak publically on bioethical issues, the topic I most frequently address is the problem of the terrible exploitation of human embryos.

Meilaender takes these topics up in chapters 4 and 5, of his Bioethics: A Primer for Christians. I will devote more space to the first issue.

CHAPTER 4, GENETIC ADVANCE (pp. 38-47)
Summary and Comment
Meilaender’s principal concern in this chapter centers on a new kind of medical therapy aimed at curing persons suffering from or genetically disposed to different genetically caused diseases such as Down Syndrome, sickle-cell anemia, diabetes, and many, many others. After describing how some of these diseases are caused genetically, Meilaender then examines the basic forms of genetic therapy: germ cell therapy and somatic cell therapy. Modifications of germ cells (i.e., the cells proper to males and females, sperm and ova respectively, that when united become a newly conceived human person) are passed on to future generations whereas modifications of somatic cells (=equals the cells found in different parts of an individual’s body, e.g., in one’s brain, pancreas, liver, colon, etc.) are not and affect only the individual whose somatic cells are modified (39-41). Meilaender repudiates germ cell therapy, judging its supposed great benefit—the overcoming of disease not just in one person but in future generations--to be its “greatest danger…[which] C. S. Lewis memorably characterized as the ‘abolition of man.’” By this Meilaender and Lewis mean that the risks of such therapy and the harmful effects it might have on our children and grandchildren are not known to man but only to God—and we are not God and ought not “play” God. On the other hand, the moral questions raised by somatic cell therapy do not call for “the no that should be spoken to germ cell modification but for caution and a willingness to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable aims of therapy” (42-43).

This is the second part of a two-part series on the U.S. Bishops’ newdocument on reproductive technology, Life-Giving Love in an Age ofTechnology, issued on November 17(www.usccb.org/LifeGivingLove/lifegivinglovedocument.pdf ).  In thefirst essay I discussed the document’s ethical framework for analyzingparticular forms of reproductive assistance.  In this essay I reviewthe document’s ethical teaching on the following forms: using gametedonors, surrogate motherhood, homologous artificial insemination, invitro fertilization, and cloning.  Each consideration is brief.  Ifinterest is expressed, I’d be happy to develop one or another of thearguments in a future blast.

Health Care

Action Alert!

Pro-life amendment killed

- By now you have probably heard that yesterday Senator Barbara Boxer offered a motion to table (i.e., eliminate chances of voting on) the Pro-life Nelson Amendment, which would have excluded federal funding for abortion in the Senate Health Care Bill.

In this Part I summarize Chapters 5 though 8 and offer reflections and comments on this very important book.

September 8, 2008 is the official date of a new doctrinal document prepared by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and approved by Pope Benedict XVI on bioethical issues.  It is a sequel to the CDF’s February 1987 doctrinal Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origins and on the Dignity of Procreation (Latin title Donum vitae). Dignitas Personae (henceforth DP), formally released for publication on December 12, 2008, is of a doctrinal nature and falls within the category of documents that "participate in the ordinary Magisterium of the successor of Peter" (see Instruction Donum veritatis, no.18), and is to be received by Catholics "with the religious assent of their spirit" (DP, no. 37).

Like many concerned with the welfare of vulnerable human life, the results of the Nov. 4 election have led me to question where our country is going.  Do the results imply we are growing more tolerant of abortion?  After three and a half decades of strenuous effort to sensitize our friends and neighbors to the ‘silent screams’ of the unborn, does the electoral outcome mean we’re losing the battle for the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens?  Does electing a president as politically tolerant of killing human embryos, fetuses and newborns as Barack Obama mean our country’s moral callousness is thickening? What does the Obama victory foreshadow for the future of preborn human life in our country?

This helpful book could be called  “Catholic Bioethics for Everyone.” Dividing their material into an introduction and seven chapters subdivided into 57 questions, Smith and Kaczor offer a broad view of major life issues in easy-to-understand language. One of their major goals is to help fellow Catholics and others to understand the reasons behind Church teaching on crucial issues concerning human life; they also hope that their presentation of fundamental principles will guide readers in making their own choices on disputed questions on which the Church has not taken a firm stance (pp. xiii-xix).

The recent announcement of the first UK baby created with a new found product guaranteed to be free from breast cancer marks a new turn in human reproduction. While most of the attention has focused on the ability to provide a guarantee for the avoidance of a life-threatening illness, the question surrounding the therapeutic role of medicine has slid by the wayside.  

http://www.gopusa.com/commentary/guest/2008/jk_0709.shtml (click here)

Lest anyone is tempted to think that the debate over hybrid embryo creation is premature, the troubling announcement on April Fools Day (4/1) that a research team at Newcastle University in England had successfully created the first part-human part-animal hybrid embryo (cow egg, human somatic cell nucleus) in the UK will make clear how late in the day the time actually is.  The embryo survived for three days.  Parliament will debate next month the morality and utility of socially sanctioning the creation of such embryos. 

Fellow in Ethics Christian Brugger clarifies, in layman terms, what it is to be: To be who we are when we were an embryo.

Recently a Catholic U.S. Coast Guard officer filed suit to prevent being forced to receive a vaccination he believed morally objectionable since the vaccine derived from the remains of an aborted child. The officer, Lt. Cmdr. Joseph Healy filed a complaint just last week, charging the government with using “its own arbitrary judgment of what constitutes Catholic theology while permitting religious exemptions to others.”

A collage of headlines covering Monday’s breakthrough in stem cell research, published in the scientific journals, Science and Cell, attempt to state what, to many, is not so obvious.   What we have found are pluripotent stem cells, equal to, but not to be confused with pluripotent embryonic stem cells.

On Sept. 5, a government agency (called the Human Fertilization and Embryology Agency or HFEA) decided to let scientists, mad or otherwise, create human/animal hybrids. Let me repeat: Science fiction will become science fact very soon; and man and beast will be combined into one.