When I teach Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as I have every term in recent memory, my students often wax poetic on the relevance of the novel as a warning of the advances of biotechnologies with too little consideration of the moral obligations the potential outcomes such experiments into the nature of nature necessarily entail. They rarely (by which I mean never) go into detail beyond broadly gesturing at cloning as a hot zone, rife with ethical dangers. But, what exactly is the problem with cloning?

Personally, I don't find reproductive cloning as a concept, not even human cloning, terribly ethically problematic. I don't believe, for example, that the clone will be "born without a soul." I don't share that limited conception of individual personality and even spiritual potentiality. I am so far from this thinking that I hesitate to counter that objection with the usual, "Do you think identical twins share one soul?" It plays into magical thinking.

I do have some limits I'd like to see imposed on reproductive cloning practices. There are ethical pitfalls.

For example, I have concerns about whether clones will be as sound in initial and successive cycles as the original. According to Wolfgang Lillge (see citation below):

Cloned animals like Dolly give the outward appearance of full health, but the probability of their having numerous genetic defects is very high. Moreover, the entire cloning procedure is extremely ineffective. Most cloned animals die before birth, and of those born alive, not even half survive for three weeks. In the best case, there is a success rate of 3 to 4 percent.

Could we, in our ignorance, be damaging the genetic copies so that later clones do not live as long or have some malfunction introduced into their organic systems? Again, according to Lillge:

So far there has been no solution to the problem of developing in the laboratory an unmistakable identifier for stem cells that can distinguish them unequivocally from cancer cells. For this reason, it is also not possible to produce sufficiently pure cell cultures from stem cells. So far, with embryonic mouse stem cells, a purity of only 80 percent has been achieved. That is in no way sufficient for cell transplantation as a human therapy. In a cell culture for therapeutic purposes, there must not be a single undifferentiated cell, since it can lead to unregulated growth, in this case to the formation of teratomas, a cancerous tumor derived from the germ layers. This problem would not be expected with adult stem cells, because of their greater differentiation.

Until we are certain that this is not the case, we need to avoid cloning higher organisms. Where we draw the line is an open question, depending on one's stand on animal experimentation. Certainly, at the threshhold of humanity, we need to consider this one bar to further progress until it is resolved.

Also, I am concerned that the cloning of higher organisms might lead to a resurrgence of genetic elitism or genetic policing. Some grant to select for desired genetic traits may be innocent and desirable, as well as some grant to deselect genetic materials that triggers or determines pathology. Again, the question becomes where we draw the line. Similarly, cloning has the potential to reduce at least physical and perhaps also other characteristic forms of individuation. The dystopic fantasies of rampant conformism that smack of Aryan design are extravagantly exaggerated from our present view, and yet deserve a watchful eye as the applications of these technologies progress.

Finally, I, like most other people who value life, cannot approve of therapeutic cloning that creates higher order beings (again, open to a sliding scale depending on one's valuation of other animal life) for the sole purpose of harvesting their physical material to sustain the life of another, not even a human other. The reduction of any potentially living, thinking, feeling entity to mere biomatter, its devaluation as an independent organism relative to another, signifies, to me, the worst form of depraved indifference.

Which brings me to the August 11th 2004 and February 8 2005 decisions by Britain's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to grant its first and second human cloning licenses. Specifically, these licenses allow researchers at Newcastle Human Embryonic Stem Cell Group to create human embryonic stem cells using the technique of cell nuclear replacement. Their purpose is to compare the stem cells that carry pathogenic genetic material with healthy and diseased cells extracted from patients. The first license was a study of diabetes and degenerative diseases such as Altzheimer's. The second is for a study of MND, a paralytic nervous system disorder.

Although I am opposed to broadly legalized abortion (see my other posts on this subject), I am not opposed in concept to stem-cell research. My ethical concern is for the source of the stem cells. Because I oppose selective abortion under almost all circumstances, I find the harvesting of stem cells from potentially viable embryos to be a gruesome example of benefiting from the deaths of developing children. Stem cells harvested from miscarried or stillborn children (if that were possible) or living volunteer donors (which is becoming increasingly likely, given new Dutch research) would be welcome research components.

This qualification returns us to the Newcastle Group (also responsible for Dolly the sheep). Their method entails removing genetic material from the blood or skin cells of a consenting donor who suffers from an inherited illness and implanting it in an egg from which the nucleus has been removed. The eggs are then fertilized and allowed to develop for approximately six days (British law allows for up to fourteen days [AP 8/11/04]), when stem cells will be extracted from them, during which process the embryos are destroyed (Reuters 2/8/05).

The most important ethical question, given the nature of this process, is whether that embryo constitutes a developing human life (to which the answer is, yes, of course) and whether a developing life (although not yet capable of independent existence) ought to be accorded some rights, at least those that ensure its treatment as a forming human being and not mere biomatter.

In the case of abortion, pro-choice lobbyists have argued that the welfare of the mother -- emotional, financial, social -- outweighs any right of her developing child in the earliest stages of its existence (some go later), especially since we must be concerned with the right of women to determine their own bodies. An embryo in this view is seen as either an undifferentiated element of the woman's body that she may electively have removed surgically or as a parasite that may be extracted from its unwilling host. In the case of therapeutic cloning, we might reasonably find a woman's donation of her unfertilized egg or blood / skin cell as the voluntary assignation of a part of her body -- no more important that a piece of hair with the root attached. There is no separate or symbiotic developing life in these tissues.

The ethical problem enters in when researchers stimulate the egg to develop and begin the formative process of an individual life. That is an entity that could have a very real, projected future as a human being. It is the forming essence of a son or daughter, one with potential intelligences, feelings, abilities, experiences. Does it matter to the ontological and so political / ethical status of the embryo that it has never seen the inside of a uterus?

Should we congratulate ourselves that we have had the restraint to stop with harvesting from developing humans so early that their destruction is of small moment to any involved, including the genetic and egg donors who understood their these forming lives were derived from their own? If some impossibly hypothetical plague were to sweep across the planet killing millions, and the only possibility of developing a cure were to remove the frontal lobes of living donors -- and the best donors for the research were teenagers -- would we congratulate ourselves on only extracting brain tissue in incremental amounts or from that population? Once we are on the slipper slope of harvesting tissue from the living for research purposes, I don't believe we can congratulate ourselves on ethical restraint at all. We have crossed a line that should have been maintained.

On this question of whether the embryo is a developing human life and whether it thus merits our consideration as such, I turn to Lillge on the science:

Normally it goes unmentioned, that it is only a small step from this so-called "therapeutic cloning" (because, it is claimed, in this way a therapy for diseases can be developed) to what is called "reproductive cloning." The only difference is that the development of the embryo is not interrupted in the early blastocyst stage; instead the embryo is implanted in a uterus and a complete organism develops–an exact genetic copy of the donor.

Those in favor of continued testing of animals for important medical research have argued that the sacrifice of these lower life forms is necessarily for the enhanced survival of we higher order ones. I don't see why those in favor of therapeutic cloning don't acknowledge the life-in-development status of human embryos and make the same case. If anyone has, I have not heard it.

I would like to suggest that the reason they don't is because the argument smacks of the most heinous form of thinking about human life we can imagine. It is the stuff of Mengele-inspired nightmares. In order to believe that what they are doing does no harm, the Newcastle researchers and their supporters must have no doubt that they are not destroying life but working toward enhancing and extending lives. That, to me, seems delusional thinking -- one that requires an irrational assertion against a basic fact.

Further, such research is conducted not because stem cells cannot be found in adults, but because "scientists believe they may not be as versatile as those found in embryos" (AP 8/11). May not be. As our understanding of stem cells and extraction methods from adult hosts improves, will we continue to find embryonic stem cells preferable? It's an open question. Even for those who are ambivalent about such methods as embryonic stem cell harvesting might allow that we should explore the possibility before taking the course we find now being established in the UK.

Consider some of the more promising developments in our understanding of stem cells and their potential for later harvest, this reported by Wolfgang Lillge, M.D. in 21st Century Science and Technology Magazine:

It is appropriate here to sketch the characteristics of stem cells, and the overthrow of some dogmas of developmental biology. Broadly speaking, a stem cell is one that–in the course of cell division and increase in the numbers of cells–is able to reproduce itself and also mature into various specialized types of cells. The stem cell with the greatest potential (totipotential) is the fertilized egg cell, which is capable of developing into a complete organism.

According to the usual–but actually very doubtful–explanation, the fertilized egg cell has totipotential up to the stage of division into eight cells, and in later stages the cells retain only "pluripotential." That is, they can form many different types of tissues, but not the complete organism. Embryonic stem cells–that is, those 50 cells within a blastocyst, which then continue to develop into the embryo proper–have this pluripotential. In the course of further specialization, stem cells of individual tissues are formed, such as that of the bone marrow, from which all the other kinds of blood cells develop.

Behind this description lies the conception that a linear process of differentiation is played out, in the development of the individual, toward increasingly "mature," specialized cells in the individual tissues, from totipotentiality to tissue specificity. This process is supposed to run only forward, but never backward. That is, as soon as a cell has reached a certain degree of "maturity," the way back to earlier stages of development is closed off. So it is evident that a stem cell’s capacity to perform is increasingly limited to specific functions, and it loses, correspondingly, the manifold capabilities still present in earlier developmental stages.

According to latest reports, however, this dogma of developmental biology does not hold. Evidently, tissue-specific stem cells have the ability–as has been impressively demonstrated in experiments with animals–to "transdifferentiate" themselves when in a different environment–that is, to take on the cell functions of the new tissue. Thus, neuronal stem cells of mice have transformed themselves into blood stem cells and produced blood cells. Indeed, there are indications of another capability of adult stem cells: Apparently they have the potential to be "reprogrammed." Not only can they adjust to the specific conditions of a new tissue environment, but they can even assume more generalized, earlier levels of development, so that it even appears possible that they become totipotent again.

See the rest of Lillge's article for details about advances in adult stem cell research, and its demonstrated productivity (to date) over embryonic stem-cell research.

For an issues briefing on the ethics of stem cell research prepared for the Australian Parliament in 2002, see here.